The politics of releasing something so small as homebrew or a backup manager is rather irrelevant. Shouldn't really matter why they release as long as it works and personally I like Iris for the PSX ISO support which has been a Cobra exclusive. Being a previous Cobra owner, it wasn't worth the buy and Iris fills MMs gaps. My opinion on the jump to higher firmwares is, well, times change. Change with them or be left behind. Those on DEX are mainly for RTEing now and they will be ok with version 4.19. Staying specifically with a few firmwares means instead of fixing bugs, deank will be making the manager better and adding features.
I like the move. Time to upgrade gentlemen.