Free-as-in-beer software advocates controlling your own fate, and this is one of the times when that is really quite useful. You might think a feature is "good"; but if the maintainer does not, your feature could just go away.<p>With free software, you can go back and download some old version that <i>does</i> work the way you want. You might sacrifice other updates in the process; but even then, it is theoretically possible to fork the older version and merge in new features. Many people obviously won't go that far, but it is certainly more control than commercial software will ever provide.