So? This isn't something Nokia does intentionally to drive away customers and developers, this is something that had to be done to maintain compatibility with upstream, and there's no simple way around it. Heck, we get a lot of benefits out of it, too. In particular, it means much easier porting for everybody (look at Transmission).

I don't know about you, but the only time I've had any trouble downloading a firmware update in 2 years was during the OS2008 release.