"Although Angular will run on ES 5 browsers (the current world), changes being made to the core Angular architecture will break every Angular application. See this InfoQ article for details, which include removal of controllers, current directive definition syntax, $scope, and more."
and from the Angular Team after the Euro conference:
"Our goal with Angular 2 is to make the best possible set of tools for building web apps not constrained by maintaining backwards compatibility with existing APIs."
Which is totally different than having to maintain an application over an extended period of time. They're two totally different issues.
The way I see these two sentences are contradicting each other:
> Why build apps now which be obsolete when 2.0 finally rolls around?
> It's like maintenance isn't even really a requirement anymore.
Also, your example application seems to have issues with management, rather than maintenance.