Why do I always have to edit kernel sourcecode?

My graphics card driver doesn't work at it should, Cisco's VPN Client isn't uptodate, VMware Server and Workstation's kernel modules need updates on a regularly basis to compile with the newest linux kernel sources and today I tried to mount a squashfs volume on my system just to find out, that I didn't have squashfs support compiled into my kernel.

Well, no problem with that, gonna have to download, compile and use it, right?

Nope. I once again had to look into the Changelog from 2.6.18 to 2.6.19 because "inode.i_blksize" has been removed. Well, not a really big deal after all, needed to delete three lines of code in the now squashfs'ed kernel (doesn't seem to matter after all, inode.i_blksize didn't have any effect obviously).

But, you guys out there developing software, drivers, etc. for Linux: why can't you be up-to-date?? 2.6.19 isn't out for just about three minutes, it has been officially release two weeks ago! I don't want to download outdated or incompatible software for current kernel releases!

Maybe, at the moment I'm too frustrated about that all, but I simply wanted to modify a file inside of this squashfs for a customer and estimated the amount of work needed to an hour - well, now (including recompiling the kernel and getting it to compile with 2.6.19) it has been more than one hour and I doubt that my customer is willing to pay for the extra-time...

Update: also the return value of "kmem_cache_destroy" has changed. Now it really seems to compile, but who knows...