The problem then is when this trickles down to projects like Ubuntu. For years, Ubuntu (the desktop distro) had Wine 1.0 as its only version of Wine, when there were something like 40 new development releases of it already available. This caused hundreds upon hundreds of bug reports and user frustrations for no good reason - issues were already fixed in most recent versions of Wine.

I used to do triaging for Wine and I can't tell you how depressing that was, the amount of time wasted by these distro policies.