I'm afraid the issue is not with the elderly. It's with people who still are not familiar with ubiquitous technology and haven't understood they need to understand how to use computers. Assuming these people were in their 50s or 60s in 2000, and still haven't picked up any computer skills 20 years later, I can understand developers just throwing the towel in the ring.
As an example, ATMs have been introduced in the 1980's... 40 years later people complain they can't use them... I fail to develop any empathy for somebody who is "set in their ways". I consider those people the bane of my existence. It's not hatred, it's just that after 20 years I have stopped advising people to make backups. If their computer fails I'm done "feeling for them". Just as much as I am done feeling for people who don't wear seat belts and die in a DUI driving an uninsured car that failed its MOT.
There comes a point where the investment in time and money just isn't worth trying to help people who refuse to be or can't be helped.
And as far as design and usability goes: either it's usable by everyone, or it's a bad design. The elderly should be included, without pandering to them specifically.
P.s.: I'm seriously considering building a website using exclusively skeumorphics, see how the youngsters try to wrestle with a rotary phone.

From a short analysis over christmas dinner (and drinks) we found out there's a reason United States of America citizens have so few days off and seem to work so many hours: they're actually not working very hard, and when they work very hard they don't seem to go about it in a smart or caring way.

Now before you tear into me let me explain what we found: we were dsicussing design and noticed how American cars were "way too big" as in: who needs 4 tons of steel to lug around a lil' old lady to go to the malll. And we went back and found out that car design in the USA is done by separate, non-communicating teams. the team working on the car-body design has absolutedly no clue how big the engine bay needs to be, the engine team has no clue how well it will be ventilated, and so on and so forth. Basically in the USA, you have one job, you do THAT job, and if you see a colleague about to mess up you either throw them under the bus, or see it as "Not my problem". In Europe teams are ofthen made to work together, this means designs can be optimized and leads to a better overal quality ( ask the Germans). This also means issues get resolved together instead of throwing them over the fence and hoping for "the other guy" to fix it.

This results in meetings where playing the blame game is frowned upon as we don't care whose fault it is as long as the problem gets fixed.

P.S.: if anybody has access to "the red book*" from Shell he'll understand what I mean. *it's a book that refers how many man-hours is needed to do a job for each country, for laying down an airstrip you might need 6 Tanzanians or 3 Senegaleze, or 1 European. Yes the book is kept secret because it's a bit of a hot topic.

P.P.S.: and if you want to know why Americans work so much it's because the work ethos is to work hard, not smart. Just check your own organisation, do they give bonuses for overtime or for meeting targets? Are those targets achievable without overtime? Does loosing your job scare you more than dying 20 years early because of work induced stress? Do you care your female coworkers do not get payed maternity-leave?

The Dutch have an expression for discussions like these, we call it "throwing a single bone into the dog pen". Woof.