The problem is, even if we filed a bug report with a patch for a 3.0 release of some distro, and it was fixed in 3.1, we still had to support 3.0. That meant code that worked with both the buggy 3.0, and the fixed 3.1. That's not a big deal when isolated to one distro or one component, but we're talking all the major distros, various third-party libraries, etc.
We may have been a bit nuts, trying to keep such a wide variety of environments supported, but that said, we also got really good at it, and it meant we didn't have to force customers to make changes to their system that they didn't want to make. The products ran on distros so old that they still only shipped GTK 1.2 (though we eventually finally walled off some of the older ones when we started supporting only 64-bit processors).