Update changes affect child themes

I just updated the theme to the latest, and I noticed that some function names in the parent theme were changed. This caused some temporary errors on a client site. An example: encounters_content_nav() has been changed to encounters_lite_content_nav(). I’m happy that I was only making reference to that one function call so it was a quick fix, but this has happened in the past where something in the parent theme is changed, that could affect child themes. You make the skeleton of a child theme available because you want people to use them, but when a change to the parent theme messes up the child theme, it all seems a bit unproductive.
As in another post in this forum, you’ve added default demo content for empty widget areas that will adversely affect pages already using those templates without widgets. The ‘Blog Right Sidebar’ one must be a bug, because they show up when I’m using the ‘front-page-full-width-widgets-only.php’ and ‘page-full-width.php’ templates. That demo content should not even show up there. I added those templates to my child theme and deleted those sidebar calls.

Another thing is that you’ve got calls to sidebars that don’t exist in the free version, but are likely in the pro version – sidebar-content-top.php, sidebar-inset-top.php, sidebar-inset-bottom.php, and sidebar-content-bottom.php.

Encounters Lite was the first theme I’ve used from Styled Themes, back when Andre was the author, and everything was great. What’s happened?
You must think of us developers using child themes. Please.