I haven't seen anybody mention the fact that Snow Leopard is a from-scratch 64-bit Intel rewrite of most of MacOS. Now given that your job is to write the network stack for OS 10.6, you're going to write a modern TCP/IP stack and test and debug it. Would you take on the additional task of writing a new AppleTalk stack? This isn't a case of some old feud resulting in code getting ripped out, it's new code not being developed. Same for file system support. And the brand new Finder looks just like the old Finder except has different bugs. If you don't like 10.6, don't upgrade. Or at least wait till 10.6.5 or so when things have settled down.
It just means that same as 10.4 and 10.5, you need an intermediate machine or two to get stuff from the early OSes to your shiny new Mac. A G3 or G4 which can boot either OS9 or OSX is your friend. I keep intending to look into XModem file software for OSX for file transfers to Apple][s and early Macs. I hope there's a good thread or two on this forum to help. (Noob here.)
