I love GNU with linux

Of course, I'm quite familiar with it (and admit to having occasional minor quarrels!)
Probably a lot like people familiar with another OS.

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How many attempts at a /dev filesystem have there been?

The original "static /dev" from 1991 is still supported and works fine. Over the past two years, various new features in the kernel have enabled proper hotplug support, and a userspace "udev" device manager app has grown up to use those features. But again, the original 1991 method still works just fine.

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How often did that break existing things?

Zero, or near to it, unless one deliberatly switched to a different method.
Installing an entire new system, eg. Ubuntu, of course will give the new methods as default. As it should.

As a matter of fact, because I installed my machines a *looong* time ago and just slowly upgraded, swapping out graphics, RAM, CPUs, motherboards, hard disks etc over time (no 'activation' here) I only moved to udev last week.
I think I wanted better device naming for my USB memory stick.
Everything else just worked the same
I just typed:
apt-get install udev
and there it was (no reboot FWIW, just a completely different way of accessing hardware online at once).
This is under Debian though - none of this flash Ubuntu nonsense

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The list goes on and on.

It certainly does! Stellar backward compatibility, no major upheavals in established distros. The hot new ones like (K)Ubuntu of course install only the latest stuff by default, but the older stuff is there too.

I installed Redhat 4.1 (I think) on an AMD something machine a while back (1997). Then I upgraded to Redhat 7.2 when it came out. in 2002-ish Then, since it worked, I left it serving my emails. I upgraded the kernel along the way for various reasons - it became a firewall so I suspect I did the ipxxxx things. I'm sure a lot of the code was the same as I ran in '96 - it certainly was running the same 1992 1Gb SCSI disks I liberated from the skip at SGI when I retired it. It's still in the spare room for sentimental reasons.

Also, just before I retired it, since it had an ISA motherboard I dug out an old 10Mb hard disk that I used in college on an Amstrad 2086 in about 1992-ish. It was MFM and used RLE (I think). Compiled the kernel, plugged it in and read my data.

Couldn't run the turbo-pascal - though I daresay I could have loaded an emulator and installed something...

And, as for the gcc thing - last week was yet another first for me
My first empeg kernel compile on my 2.6.18.3 (old, I know) *Intel based* kernel.
I just downloaded the 2.95 arm cross compile toolchain built on god-knows what system back in the mists of time and ran it and got a new kernel.

I wonder if the same proprietary toolchain used in Cambridge back in the day would run under Vista?
I can't remember why the player code is now totally dead but isn't it because the toolchain won't run? (really, I don't know but I thought that was the reason).

Feel free to moan about suspend/hibernate though
Or 3D-acceleration on graphics cards.
or many many other things - what's life without tribes?