Do you not think the practice of pushing out a new version of iOS every year is driven by customer demand and expectation, rather than an arbitary decision by Apple? The problem is, people expect a revolutionary, magical new iPhone every year and a new version of iOS packed with new features. Fail to provide and you lose customers, many more than you'll lose due to bugs that the majority of your customers aren't even going to know or care about.
And as for the emoji comment, I'm sure you know that that's not Apple's decision, and the hype surrounding emojis is generated by sites like MR; Apple themselves don't make that much of it.