Jajaja no, but I should probably, it's always good to get examined on a regular basis.
I mean, it's a good thing to fight for your rights, but do it excessively is obsessive, this devs provide you a game that work correctly even better than before and you even have a problem with that because you simply like it the lack of widescreen support and required 10 community patches to work correctly? GOG provide a back up installers for their games, that means that you could have a personal back up from all the versions that exist of one game but you want to have it all the time at all times, and probably that will be impractical because some games update a lot, for example Baldur's Gate EE recived too many patcher over the curse of 10 years to this point, imagine have to look over all those patcher when you try to download the game, and for what? For nothing, it's useless for the avarage consumer, but here you have the possibility to do it, just have to do it on time, there is a program that can do it for you if your disk space bothers you that much.
But are just complaining for something trivial and in this case useful.
You want the back up now? Then just install Galaxy, rollback to one of the versions available (I think is the latest 5 or so like Steam) and just copy the files and put it in a folder and you have a back up of the version you like. If you saw a problem in that solution, then the problem is not the store or the devs, it's you.

THIS, is precisely why I hate this DL version of software sales. Gddmn it, give me back the box, manual and CD/DVD physical copy.

You can easily keep several versions of DL version of a game on your hard drive, if you wish.

I have done that too for a few GOG games where I felt there is some reason to keep the old version around. Sometimes it was merely some academic interest, like keeping the original version of Among The Sleep, just to see how the original differs from the updated version.

The only problem you have is that you don't download your GOG games, but trust the store (GOG) to keep the games for you on their servers. What will you do if GOG closes its doors permanently at some point? Then you have lost all your games.

Not downloading your DL games is similar to buying a physical CD game from the store... but not bringing it home, but instead letting the store keep it, and tell them you will come to get it later when you feel like playing the game.

Whether that makes any sense at all is a different question. It would severely multiply the amount of storage space needed for GOG games.

The fact that GOG offers such option through Galaxy for some older versions of games can be seen as an extra service that no one really expects an online store to do.

Not this crap again, its origins date back to a time when Steam was only selling Valve's own games, but everyone now just assumes that it covers all games on Steam until they are asked to provide a source.

And even with just Valve's own games, should Steam be closing down, the only way Valve could turn their games DRM-free at that time is if the gaming studio itself is still well off enough to have no outstanding debts to anyone, as someone has to be paid for making the DRM-free versions and distributing them while the debtors could sue them if they feel that their chances to get their money back are worse once the games no longer have DRM.

Incredibly rude.

DRM-free is a very simple concept that we like to overcomplicate on these forums.
All it means is that when I buy a product, I expect that product to be the same product 10-50 years in the future, and I expect it to still be in my possession. The games I buy should not be tickets to ever-changing amusement parks, they should be static snapshots of software.

Patches and fixes are absolutely welcome and very much appreciated, but they should be optional downloads (which was the default many years ago). I say this as a developer who is fully aware that that this is an impossible dream in 2022 where software companies literally plan to release initially barebones versions of the software they are developing before development even starts. Development is just considered an on-going service nowadays. It's horrible, but customers have proven with their wallets that they prefer this software-as-a-service business model.

Back to Darwinia, you might think that revoking someone's access to a previous version of a game is okay when they replaced it with a new and improved version. It's the same game minus some bugs after all, so what's there to complain about?

In my opinion, even simple patches should be optional as I might have nostalgia for a specific early version of the game and would like to keep that. I am even more of a stickler than OP since I get annoyed when the box art of a game in my library is forced to change, or when the title of my game has changed into some ugly corporate "hooray" version (ENHANCED edition, DEFINITIVE edition, ANNIVERSARY edition, etc.). Admittedly, these changes have absolutely no impact on the actual game and, if I was a robot that could only think objectively, I wouldn't be bothered by them. Humans though tend to think subjectively about things. For example, we might cherish memories of the original box art or the broken version of a game, so we become mad when they disappear.

Again, it's not that we hate publishers/developers for making this new and improved version. This is an amazing free update to Darwinia based on what I am reading here, and we are grateful that the developers put in the work and made this all available for free. It's generous, they could have easily hidden this behind a paywall. Still, it should ideally be a choice to upgrade.

Ironically most of Valve's own games are already DRM-free.

Yep, people tell me that all the time, but I consider I just say things clearly.
Look, you have the possibility to have the 1.0 version of a game if you want, or even previous to that if you bought an Early Access version, but that is your responsibility, you have to download and save that version and nobody in the world will do anything to you or to that version, won't update it, delete it or modify it or put a gun in your head to make you do it. Yes, in modern times you could see games as a service, back in the day if a game released incomplete or with a DRM and then that DRM get obsoleted, that game was dead for good. Now in the modern digital era, the devs can remove the DRM and that game work again, can make it compatible with new systems, a new OS, a new monitor, etc. And the game will be the same. This is the case with Darwinia, an update version of the same game, they give you Darwinia with widescreen support and some antialiasing options, not a completely different game called Titty Blasters 3000 that now is a shooter with anthropomorphic cats that consume steroids, it's the same game with some enhancements, but your OCD doesn't allow you to see that and you are complaining for something extremely trivial (I know because I suffer of OCD and know how much bother me that somebody don't put my books alphabetical order per autor). Look, make some back ups for all your games, put them in an external HDD or SDD, put it on some place nobody will touch it and all your versions safe and preserved as you exactly remember and your nostalgia won't be altered, that is my recommendation, it's your possibility, it will be exactly the same for those disc or floppy disk games we have storage as a collectable but we have to end up buying a digital version to play them on modern systems.

^ People should definitely backup their game files to avoid unwanted changes, however it's also entirely possible to buy an old game for the first time fairly recently and you never had an "old" version to backup in the first place. This is why some of us are annoyed at GOG for not fixing the Divinity Original Sin bug that was introduced in 2017 with the addition of the Chinese subtitles. "But the game came out in 2015 so you had two years to backup the earlier non-buggy version" only applies to those who bought during 2015-2017. For those who bought post 2017 after there never was a "good" older version to backup. Same with other games, eg, a ScummVM game can be played on Mac, Linux & even Android tablets & Raspberry Pi's whilst a Remastered "replacement" could be Windows-only. And people discover 20-30 year old games for the first time, all the time.

So whilst you're right about not relying on any "cloud version" (including GOG's) for permanence, and regardless of whether people prefer the old or new version of Darwinia specifically, it's just good practice for "Good Old Games" to include the original version of all good old games (even as an unsupported extra) due to the obvious common sense thing that if GOG doesn't supply it, people will start to look for it on "other" sites that still do...

That's a really good point. If you have this sort of OCD, you should follow through and also obsessive compulsively back up your game version.

I guess my actual complaint is why we need to have our games replaced in our library considering we already have systems in place to do automatic updates and revert to previous patches.

Also, while everything you said is right, I do still think you are undermining just how much of an update this may have been for some people. A new graphical engine probably means the system req's may have been upped. This could make the game go from "playable" to "non-playable" which is a pretty significant change.

And ironically while my old principle of buying the pirated games I ended up finishing was at first the stronger factor at keeping me from playing Half-Life 2, over the years my refusal to support online authentication for single player games grew so strong that even unofficially DRM-free games are not a good enough reason for me to consider creating a Steam account anymore, so I will continue to wait for those games to become abandonware if I can't buy them officially DRM-free.

Even if the new engine might run more efficiently, it might be compiled to require some library that only works with a newer OS than which the old engine could be run, so ideally GOG should always provide in the extras the original version if official GOG release will not run on original hardware and then keep adding previous versions there whenever the engine is changed too drastically or the game for example is changed so much that players would need to redistribute their skill points if they wish to continue playing their previous saves after the update.

Of course someone will likely counter that by claiming that it would cost too much to host all that old data, but to that I would suggest that GOG could save a lot of storage space by separating all OS specific files from all the rest of the data that is identical between different systems as the latter tend to take a lot more space and change much less often than the former stuff, so not only would we need to download the shared data only once to be able to install the same version of a game to Windows, Mac and Linux, but more often than not, the shared data packages would remain the same between different patch versions too, so we too would need far smaller backup disks if GOG would let the shared data packages remain the same as long as possible instead of creating new full installer sets after every other patch release.