When I read the OP's comment all I could think about was what it would be like writing a decent web app in the bad ol' IE days if it also had to work in most of those crappy symbian flip phone browsers. I agree with you completely. Meeting expectations today is really tough, but the expectations are much higher in most ways.
Indeed. As a contractor I often have to use the latest and greatest because project leads read about it somewhere and designers go wild. Which means that the work is not significantly easier because the goal-posts just moved.
But for smaller clients that I have full control over, I usually take a subset of functionality that I know is stable and consistent by now, and I only go for bleeding-edge stuff if the budget allows it (because, of course, it is fun to play with shiny new stuff).
