Editing a Custom Form (and retroactively impacting EVERYTHING)

A real pain point is having ALL prior projects, etc. be impacted by a change in a used Custom Form. In the event that a custom form is updated (due to changing business needs), then we're required to add in a NEW custom form (i.e. version 2).

In a practical example, if I need to add ONE piece of information to a form, then in order for me to 1) not lost historical data; 2) have a satisfactory form on project moving forward, I must add them both the project template--thereby impacting all "net new" projects.

I would expect that simply making the edit on a custom form would "time stamp" the edit so ONLY those projects moving forward would be impacted with the new information.