I think you're missing the point, 12 still carries the driver and there's nothing stopping you from using it 20 years from now or for that matter you maintaining it and so on. You can use old hardware but it obviously comes with some limitations. While it's technically possible to still use an old Pentium II (or similar in performance) computer it'll very likely be unbearably slow to use as a desktop, are you going to demand that the whole world is going to adapt to your hardware?
Yes, I understand that. There is a very strong urge to throw away things nowadays. In the internet more and more merchants start to offer a new service: they offer to throw away the freshly bought products before even sending them to their customers, so that these spare the hassle of having to receive them.
Support in this case means that the project as a whole has decided to drop support because of one or several reasons such as interest, documentation, hardware available etc. The code is free and if someone wants to provide an improved driver it would be perfectly fine to keep it as a port however I don't understand why people think it's their "right" to get support.
Nobody implied any "right" to get any support. Only the question was raised about the
reason for dropping support. And in my viewpoint such question is absolutely valid, due to the beforementioned facts (Africa etc.).
..and lets put it into a better perspective, say the driver is kept and because if its status (in tree / supported) people still use it and it turns out there's a nasty bug that corrupts your data. Are you going to blame yourself or blame a project/person for claiming the driver being supported despite no one is able to work on and test the driver not to mention the potential data loss? Just because something compiles doesn't mean that it works as intended.
That's bogus. We have a user here, and maybe that user would be willing to run test cases. At this point
we just don't know.
But this is exactly the problem that comes from the Ivory-Tower-League:
per definition there has to be a strict separation between the users and the development, and
per definition the users have to be extremely stupid and behave like you describe in this paragraph.