Wouldn't the whole point be to impress people with CS2 so that they upgrade to a new version and Adobe gets paid? So... yeah, it needs to work and it needs at least basic support. If I download my "free" version of Photoshop and the installer crashes I am less likely to buy the new version.
A crippled version of the most current version of the software would make much more sense.
I disagree. CS2 could do almost everything I'm doing with PS today. To take even more extreme example, I would be pretty happy with MS Word 1997 if I never had to open new document formats introduced in the later versions. Yes, it's 15 years old and I don't even know how many versions obsolete.
It still seems to contain an unpatched code execution vulnerability from 2010, fixed in CS5 and up [1], I'd say that's "bad enough" to warrant not using it.