I remember a time when games didn't require patches.

Sure, but games were a lot less complicated back then - not an excuse but a reason. Plus look at the wide range of hardware configurations you have to target now.

I think some of the developers just made it look easy when they released patches for games, and they didn't break stuff but fixed things.

The other problem is the people who end up patching the games often aren't the people who actually created the game in the first place, Battlefield 2 is a good example of this. Not even DICE knows how to properly fix bugs in their own game anymore.

Does it suck that BIS will most likely not bother to work on ArmA1 anymore? yeah it does for those who don't want to invest in new hardware to run ArmA2 properly. But that's just the way it goes.