newer kernel in -current tree: 3.14.3
anyone can confirm that 304.121 works with this kernel?

Regarding modelines - Some monitors, especially some earlier HDTVs, have horrible EDIDs and must be overridden. We can't always assume X will figure it out.

Regarding consternation - AMD has worse support for legacy video cards than nVidia, although the FOSS drivers are often better than nouveau on nVidia.

Someone pointed out that FOSS video drivers for ANY legacy video card, regardless of manufacturer, tend to "go south" over time because the devs have upgraded their hardware and no longer can properly maintain. This should be a lesson. If newer video cards are available for your platform it is just easier and most often a delightful improvement to upgrade and some very decent video cards are quite cheap. It is not at all uncommon for a $60 modern card to outperform a $200 card from 5-7 years ago. Many will reduce the load on your also aging CPU as well.

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i can confirm 304.121 worked without any patch for Linux Kernel 3.14.3

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I've been using 319.82 for a while now as anything newer than that introduces tearing to 'xv' video on my box, but that only works up to 3.12.y (or 3.13.y using an unofficial patch). Think I'll give the 304.xx drivers a go and see if they're also tear-free. Will likely be easier to keep updated if they work for me.

Legacy open source code can break just by recompiling it. So even with FOSS drivers, the better strategy would be keeping the known-good binaries around and plug them into stable interfaces. This is how commercial closed source OSes handle this.

Sadly with "modular Xorg" this isn't possible and that makes the whole "modularity" a joke. In the early days of monolithic X11, you just had to keep a working X server binary around...

That is only an option for a minority of all PCs. Most GPUs are integrated (notebook etc.) and even if you have an expansion bus available, it is already outdated (like AGP) by the time the driver bit-rot problem surfaces.

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Thankfully it is doubtful that PCIe will be saturated for many years. Hopefully more notebook manufacturers will plan for this, or already are, and will provide notebook users with an upgrade path for graphics.

In most modern PCs PCIe isn't used anymore for graphics, because the graphics processor is integrated directly into the CPU.
Most notebook manufacturers want to sell non-upgradable thin and light devices together with mainstream operating systems. These OSes don't have GPL issues and provide stable driver interfaces. The hardware manufacturers don't care about self-induced binary driver breakage in niche platforms.