Stored procedures have the wrong versioning model. If they were version-locked to the application code, instead of to the database schema, they'd be less of a pain and people might be more willing to use them.
Version differences in distributed systems (including Web apps) are a real pain! In many circumstances they're unavoidable, and we've developed various techniques to make them marginally easier, but if you can avoid the issue entirely by just not having the thing be distributed, that's the more maintainable choice.
Oracle has a feature called 'editions' that does this. Different DB sessions can have different versions of redefinable objects like stored procs and packages.
