Then Drupal comes along, breaks half a dozen APIs as it is wont to do -- and I'm spending a year sabbatical living in the Andes and not doing any work on the module at all.
If that is the case, then NO ONE should be shocked that there are problems. Get another developer to pick up the project, announce that it won't be supported anymore, give someone else commit rights... After a year away, I think the module can legitimately be considered 'abandoned.'
You release a new verison of Drupal but without the one module most people want, because I am not around to update it. What do you do?
Pay money to have it updated by someone else, or not upgrade. It's not rocket science.
Multiply this times the dozen or so most popular modules; lather, rinse, repeat.
I can think of maybe a handful of modules that are THAT complex. Views? Yes. Project? Yes. eCommerce and its suite of related modules? Absolutely. Those are all important, but declaring that we will never ship Drupal if those modules aren't released at the same time is silly. --Jeff