I was excited to hear that 2.0 wasn't backwards-compatible, but apparently (from the community feeds I'm still connected with) things haven't improved much.

The problem seems to be that they just didn't have a deep engineering bench at Magento, and as the red-headed stepchild of eBay a few years after their acquisition they had no way to hire. (I was actually pitched a "CTO of Magento" job at eBay Enterprise a few years ago, but the comp package wouldn't have matched my lead engineers' at the time and most of the dev team was overseas and chosen based on price. It looked like a nightmare.)

edit: Apparently they've since been sold to a private equity firm to be managed for cashflow, which is a common outcome for stagnant enterprise companies with vendor lock-in and rich fees. So much for buying their way out of their code hole.