Hi Michael,
It's just that Linaro is funded by some of the biggest chip vendors to improve Linux on the latest and future generations of ARM chips. That's an investment for them, and this will make the future products based on their chips more competitive.
Linaro has finite resources and budget. We can't work on everything, unfortunately.
I'm very curious about your job. I'm trying to understand it, but a distro compatibility for every arm cpu is a great thing, making possible, with some change in pre-bootloader, bootloader, kernel, to have the custom board derived from evm compatible to choosen distro as well.
Of course, we will make sure that our contributions to mainline projects don't break existing platforms. Anyway, you can still count on other community projects to continue to support all the other ARM cores. In particular, Debian is a great distro for armv5 cpus.
Anyway, I'll go on with Openembedded for armv5.
Thx, Raffaele