> Yes, this leads to an architectural mess
Right there.
There's no notable advantage in supporting a very small minority of the applications out there, at the cost of keeping units useless for the 99%.
Potentially one if a large customer's paying you for it.
At work, I'm helping a client upgrade from a decade old version (v12) of our product and having to copy over the switches to keep the even older (v11 and previous) behaviours
I’m quite sure we will be OK without support for 16-bit instructions.
> Yes, this leads to an architectural mess
Right there.
There's no notable advantage in supporting a very small minority of the applications out there, at the cost of keeping units useless for the 99%.