Maybe it is time to stop advocating open source drivers as something that benefits everyone.
Apparently old models get dropped just as with binary blobs, or maybe not, given that the Windows drivers work today just as 10 years ago with GL 4.1 and DX 11.
Well your hardware is from a time when AMD was still primarily pursuing the binary fglrx driver - if your card had an open source driver back then it would still work. What got dropped is the proprietary driver, not functionality from the open source driver. And with r600g being open source, people (mainly Red Hat's Dave Airlie) have been adding to it - in particular, there is OpenGL 4 support for some cards now, just not for all yet.
Just because you are unhappy that your card was too old to be included in the current open source driver does not mean you have to spread FUD about it.