Brad, you are entirely missing the point.
There are two aspects here, let's just imagine a car.
1) You buy the car and when you bought it there was this very weird thing. Whenever there were more than three people in the car it wouldn't start. So, to start it with passengers first everybody had to get out, you start the car, and everybody gets back in. Sounds annoying, doesn't it? So you would just give the car back until they fix that bug? Oh, too bad, the car was not sold, it was licensed, and as you already sat in the car you used it, so you can't give it back. Yeah, you were able to test it before, but honestly, who invites a bunch of friends to test a car.
But here are the good news: the car company has fixed the bug and you can get a free update to your car so it now starts with all your friends inside.
This is, more or less, the step from 5.0.0 to 5.0.1. The same way someone would expect a car to work I expect software to work. And if you think that expecting bugfixes to be free is a bad attitude you should really start to rethink that.
2) You have that car, but there is this other thing: Once a friend of yours sat on a spot, they can't easily use another shot. First the friend who originally called shotgun has to sit next to you, then has to get out of the car, and then another friend can use that spot. This is, well, not a bug itself, but oh boy it is annoying. Also, if you want to use the lights of your car you have a little display and buttons, and you have to scroll through all the options using the tiny display to find the light configuration you want to use. Not a bug, but just a very bad design choice.
But here are the good news! There is an upgrade kit for your car, it has no hardware, just a little software update that removes those annoying things. And it only is $99!
This is, more or less, the step from 5.0.1 to 6.0.0. If a car manufacturer had designed parts of the car badly I would expect them to fix this because it should not have been like this in the first place.
And to quote you directly:
as it devalues the massive amount of work that is needed to make it good and keep it fresh as technology changes.
The update from V to VI is not for keeping it fresh with changing technology. And one can say that it makes parts of the software good this is just because those parts were really bad beforehand. They did not got worse over time, they were bad from the beginning.