Of course you can order a CD and then download. Buying a CD is a way of supporting the project, not just an installation mechanism.

It is a volunteer project - there is only one full time developer - and like all such it is a compromise between support and new features, and it happens that at the moment most people prefer doing development rather than maintenance. If everyone was interested in maintenance, OpenBSD releases might have a longer lifetime, but development pace would be considerably slower.

The fact is that as OpenBSD, unlike Linux, does not have large commercial backers, so unless people donate their time and money to work on the things they consider important, it becomes unlikely to happen. Perhaps you would like to donate some of your time to supporting older releases? I can say with some confidence that if you prefer just to complain, most OpenBSD users and developers will care very little for your opinions.

Note that there are commercial organizations providing OpenBSD support if you require it.

I don't know where you get your ideas about poor hardware support, OpenBSD hardware support is not hugely worse than, for example, FreeBSD, and better in some areas.

> I wonder what Theo will say about all this? 9 times out of 10 he tends to scorn things,
> so I wonder if he'll embrace this with open arms, or just shun it like he does most things.

This is an official OpenBSD effort, all of the directors are OpenBSD developers. I'm sure
Theo was pretty central to setting it up, he is unlikely to shun it.