Throwing your 98 cents of change back over the counter… 
You clearly haven’t worked in any software development capacity for any length of time, have you?
You haven’t met any of the whiners, and of the “good idea” people, the brand-new product managers about to change the world (and their annual bonus, of course), the “but we want to build the best Linux of the world” crowd, have you?
I am now old enough to have met enough samples of any of them to make some sweeping general judgements.
Whenever you introduce anything new to a piece of software because some user begged you for it, and you saw that it was a very reasonable request, and you told that user who wanted it “but it comes with some caveats: it’s limited to this and that use case; it will never work in the general case for every possible scenario”, and that user agreed, and you implemented it with that caveat and announced the limitations, it will take about 20 nanoseconds for the wiseasses and the “but we want the best Linux of the world!” crowd to pop up and start whining and nagging.
It starts with a seemingly harmless question or an enhancement request in your issue tracker; something like “hey, I noticed that the finaglify feature doesn’t work in this case” (and describing said case), and you answer with "yes, that was the limitation that I announced and documented when the feature was introduced! - some more “…but couldn’t you just…” back and forth arguments later you start giving up on mankind, and at some point, that user falls silent. In the bug tracker, that is.
He is now moving on to Reddit, the Great Cesspool of the Internet, where all the wiseasses and whiners meet; and starts publicly spreading FUD and badmouthing that piece of software that he got from you for free; because Open Source, and damn all those “limited warranty” paragraphs in the license legalese.
Somebody in that forum will finally shut him up (yes, there are some of those people even in Great Cesspool Land), and he will disappear for the while. Some weeks later, a new user name will pop up in the same place and spread the same bad-mouthing and FUD again with the exact same wording.
You have made an indirect penpal friend for life; or at least for the next ten or so years.
Been there. Seen that. Got the T-shirt; the whole edition in different colors.
About removing features: You may or may not have read my long post about it, but this is exactly what ultimately killed YaST, and why nobody wants to touch YaST anymore with a 3 meters (the civilized part of the world uses metric, not some medieval king’s foot size) pole. Because a gazillion such people brought in such “good ideas” or worse, contributed patches to implement stuff that keeps adding technical debt.
It took 25 years, but now YaST is on the way out. It’s not exactly dead yet, but the smell has become unmistakable. Because we could never remove any of the counterproductive BS “features” that accumulated over the years.
So keep your old piece of junk software and have a lot of fun with it - as long as it lasts. When it breaks, don’t expect anybody to come to the rescue; because those who have the know-how also know the whiners.
As for “pay” and “corporations”, who do you think pays for software development in the first place? Who is funding Linux kernel development, Linux distributions, the tools that make a distribution special?
Is it grateful users who keep donating to Open Source with the PayPal account that many have on their GitHub page? - Okay, just kidding; in 10+ years of QDirStat development I received something like $15 of donations on average by year, amazingly often enough from people who I am sure couldn’t really afford it.
No, of course it was one of those “evil” corporations who paid me a monthly salary over many years. Without it, there wouldn’t be a SUSE distro, neither SLES nor openSUSE.
