Facebook is forcing use of its new messenger app, which is only supported on iOS7? I'm running iOS 6.* on an IPhone 3Gs.

I noticed that Facebook was talking about redacting support for messaging inside the Facebook app... 

This slightly bothered me, considering I am Quite happy using SMS for instant messaging, and Facebook for less frequent chat.

Regardless of how I feel, I now see that they are "Forcing" users over to their secondary Messenger application... which seems to be quite the ignorant move on their part-

When I went to the appstore to download the new messenger application... I found out that it was only supported in iOS7...

Will we really no longer be able to send and receive messages using Facebook on anything but the latest model phones? 

Seeing as how they are doing the same on Android, and Seeing as how I wasn't offered to use a version of Facebook Messenger that was supported by iOS 6.*...

They can't really be considering dropping all support for any "older" model phone, can they? that is more than just stupid, it's plain cynical. 

The tech enthusiast in me wants to believe their is a work around for this, or something I have simply over looked. but the conspiracy theorist in me wants to scream out about how this feels like they are trying to coerce mobile device owners to upgrade their phones.

It just doesn't feel fair, or even logical, that iOS 6.* should not support a basic messaging application.. especially one from a Company such as Facebook. they certainly have the wherewithal to support development of multiple versions of an applications.

are they really so out of touch that they could not possibly fork their app in the development repository, and build a release supporting the ios 6.* API/SDK?

in short (and minus the rant), does anybody else have this concern? does anybody know how to work around this issue? does anybody actually know how to contact Facebook in order to complain?
The mobile site will still allow you to send/receive messages in Safari and other browsers. It may also be that the version of the app you are using is so old that they cannot prevent the messenging functionality from working; you'll have to wait to see about that or dig up user comments on the topic from Europe, which was pushed into this model in the spring. 

Considering that the public's response to this news has been almost uniformly negative, I think it's reasonable to suspect that this policy change may be reversed after the numbers are crunched and usage declines become obvious. The primary point of splitting the apps is to increase revenue by doubling the ads the users are forced to see; if people stop using the original app and refuse to download the messenger app, this plan backfires.