Simple. You obviously don’t convince them in view points other than the overall vision backing the product, so you get people for idealistic reasons … and an almost competitionless openness of the phone, so you get tinkerers and hobbyists.
Idealists are content with the phone just doing its job.
Bragging rights concerning OS version numbers and the SoC release date are kindergarten level, but have nothing to do with age or a generation … some people just grow out of that sooner, some later, and some never 
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Tinkerers and hobbyists are content with the phone just doing its job because compared to other phones they can control more easily what does happen on the phone and what doesn’t.
Just running after the latest marketing-induced fad is not a thing Fairphone are badly missing out on, it is a multi-level problem Fairphone identified as such and try to tackle by showing people that the industry could operate differently in practice, if people would buy into it.
Eventually, new hardware has to come, that much is certain … but not because there’s something newer out there already, but because every hardware has an EOL.