Well from my companies perspective. up until March this year. (LAndesk has been used here for 3 years now) the consultant was called in to do all application upgrades because there was no one in house willing to take the task on. Therefore we are still using 7.5.1 in our live environment. I have have now tested the upgrade to 7.7.1 and it's working in our test environment and now working on the live implementation. which is taking months to get done because of my commitments and the team that are supporting it also very difficult.
You are lucky but there's nothing for you to apologise for and not a lot LANDesk can do as it's a business decision to go down this route, no matter the benefits of having someone doing it full time.
Such is life.