After all the trouble you went through, would you really call your experience an "upgrade"? It sounds like you are barely tolerating upgrades. In terms of user experience, Apple has terrible UX because they impose on their users so much.
There is no justification for what Apple is doing. They are downgrading and arguably damaging your computer, because 1) they are too lazy to support more than one operating system, 2) they want to use you as a beta tester 3) they want to ensure the integrity of their DRM ecosystem. It is the same reason that I am coerced into installing Sierra if I want to put a video on my iPad that they forced an iOS9 update onto (I would have to "upgrade" iTunes which requires that I update the OS).
Apple has had a planned-obsolescence approach for years and years [1], but with the way software used to be distributed and the consumer expectations on hardware design it was less of a problem before. If you want to keep using an old Mac, there are plenty of OS install disks, copies of old shareware floating around, sites like Low End Mac which document what works and what doesn't. The hardware was also usually more repairable. I'm worried that current Macs in the age of App Store OS updates and glued battery will be rendered into expensive paperweights that much more certainly when Apple withdraws support.
I also wouldn't be surprised if Apple employees tended to test on the newer Apple gear, and older models sat somewhere as part of a bulk testing unit, meaning they don't personally experience the same slowdowns as you.
Indeed. When I was on a six month contract for Retail Software Engineering, I observed that everyone had hardware that was at least a year or two old. I was told that the new hardware is reserved for paying customers, and if you wanted a new machine you could use your employee discount to buy one.
Otherwise, the only people who get the latest hardware are those who need to test or develop code on it, and that is a very small fraction of the total number of employees.
1) Mac supports multiple operating systems through BootCamp.
2) Apple has a beta program if you want to see what beta releases actually look like. What Apple is doing is releasing updates in a more agile fashion i.e. more frequent at the expense of longer test/fix iterations.
3) Apple has no DRM on the Mac and on iOS it isn't about rights management. It's purely about not allowing side loading of apps to ensure security and privacy.
4 There are plenty of ways to put videos on an iPad that doesn't require iTunes nor an OS update.
There is no justification for what Apple is doing. They are downgrading and arguably damaging your computer, because 1) they are too lazy to support more than one operating system, 2) they want to use you as a beta tester 3) they want to ensure the integrity of their DRM ecosystem. It is the same reason that I am coerced into installing Sierra if I want to put a video on my iPad that they forced an iOS9 update onto (I would have to "upgrade" iTunes which requires that I update the OS).
Sadly, this has become a trend.