itunes shutout?

I'm a MAC user, and I usually use iTunes to play my tunes. Some time ago I decided to never update iTunes on principle. It was clear that burning mixes, playing around with my library, etc. were getting progressively more annoying / restrictive. New features I didn't want appeared, old features I did disappeared. After a recent move, my harddrive crashed and I had to reinstall everything. Best I could do was Leopard, since the computer is a dual G5 (I discovered upon taking it to the Apple store that it is officially classified by them as "vintage" (since it is over 5 years old) and they will not work on it anymore). So, right now, the computer runs Leopard-era iTunes with zero updates. Two days ago, I was unable to access the iTunes store, and haven't been able to since.

(Not only did I access it in the recent past after reinstalling everything, but bought several tracks. Note: the iTunes store remembers your past purchases, but will not let you download them again without re-purchase. This means, for example, if you try to download an album you only owned a couple tracks from in the past, it assumes you want to "complete" it, making redownloading the tracks you lost that much more annoying. Thank you iTunes for making my harddrive loss that much more painful.)

I wonder if this indicates a deliberate attempt to shutout users of older versions of iTunes from acquiring new tracks (which Apple doubtless assumes they will bootleg, because why else would they not want a clutter of useless new features)? Or, is this just the result of some iTunes website update that assumed no one out there could possibly be running Leopard-era iTunes without updates anymore (and so there was no reason to give a fig about backwards compatibility)?