God I hate this kind of paternalistic reasoning from developers. Nobody is saying that you can never update software ever, just that those updates should be driven by a clear functional reason. Implementing a change that you know your users will hate just to switch to a "modern" UI does not serve users.

> Users come around eventually.

How do you know? A number of apps I use have overhauled their UI in a way that made it look shinier at a glance, but categorically worse for actually using. I either stopped using them if the change was too awful, or eventually just stopped leaving negative feedback once it was clear the devs didn't care. Never once have I hated an update at first and later thought to myself, "Wow I was so wrong, this update is actually amazing, I'm glad the dev team ignored all of that negative feedback and forced it on their existing users".

> With that rationale you literally can't change anything ever. Version 1.0 ever after.

The point was IF users hate it, you probably did something wrong in the redesign. That doesn't exclude the possibility of doing a redesign that users are excited about.

Plenty of IM clients I use update semi-regularly with new features, and I'm either neutral or excited based on whether I plan to use that feature, but I'm never upset because they're not breaking my existing workflow.

And, yes, sometimes a redesign just takes time to come around to, but there's also lots of redesigns that genuinely reduce functionality. I've lost track of how many times an update has outright removed a favorite feature of mine, reduced configuration options, and so on. This might be a sensible business decision, but it's not to my benefit.