I can kinda understand that as well & that this is not fully under their control due to Google & manufacturer policies. Still I'm afraid this can still make quite a few users rightfully angry due to their hardware becoming partially obsolete on the software side, something that many might have thought Sailfish OS will be able to avoid, unlike Android.

Also, to kinda add an insult to the injury, unlike being locked in place due to proprietary blobs on the N900, we have actually all the latest kernels and drivers available for the Xperia X due to the Sony open device program. It's just lack of resources on Jollas side preventing them from maintaining the two split release streams.

Well, definitely a bummer & we can only hope we will not loose too many community members due to this...

Well, a good supply of cheap second hand hardware can be a very good motivation for people to jump on board and play with Sailfish OS. Also given the license prize (something most mobile OS users are likely not used to at all), making the available hardware cheap also definitely helps, not to mention being able to installing the trial version (I think that is still available ?) avoiding the license prize at all initially.

But this only works if the supported second hand hardware is reasonably supported by Sailfish OS - people finding out only afterwards that their second hand Sailfish OS phone is not really that much supported & the might need to spend more money for a new one might yet again not paint the best image.

Oh well, hopefully one day mobile device can finally work like modern laptops - with generic distro images & mainline kernels and all this per device and per device baseport version support nonsense is a thing of the past. :P