To be fair, I think it's a reasonable expectation for the vendor to stop support of an obsoleted product once it's been announced, especially a v4 unit. Michael did provide ample notice of this change when it occurred. It would have been nice if he had a link for downloading the old Configurator version with caveats about old Microsoft libraries required for support. But I think his election not to do this is not unreasonable for the previous point cited.
One consideration which would be nice to think about is what happens if or when all of these products are no longer supported. Is the design of the software such that it will still function properly if the online dependencies no longer exist for some reason? Having a standalone configuration is nice.
Michael's hardware is rock solid and very stable. Kudos to Lintronic for developing something that works really well.