While I don't agree with the overall tone of the original poster. The truth is, that the ideal solution would be for IV to compile the game against the newest libraries and on a 64bit system. That way we can have an updated blob for each arch that will "just work". Not to mention, maybe the game would work better with the latest SDL system? I don't know if there would be a difference. But I do know that when I try to make the game use my systems SDL sound stops working. All distros will be dropping these older libraries soon. Ubuntu already has. libstdc++ 5 has been considered deprecated for years now. And the loki installer is very old. Honestly I would be happy with a simple script based installer. But if a gui is needed,
MojoSetup would be a good way to go.
And while you are correct in saying that the various distros should support backward compatibility, they have, for quite a long time.
And twist, if your having trouble getting the game to work on 64bit, see my post
here. If you cant find anything on the forum that is helpfull, post your problem (error messages etc.) and what your system specs are.