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Even if that ever happens, don't worry -- you won't lose access to your funds. As long as there are no hard forks in the bitcoin network, which could make things that work today unfunctional in the future, your private keys will still be able to unlock the coins you have obtained in the past. Your private keys are derived deterministically from your seed phrase; the process of derivation is described in certain standards. Everything about these standards is completely transparent, and all the code is free to download and implement into any wallet. Most wallets have already adopted these standards, it is extremely unlikely they will switch to something else in the foreseeable future. Even if they find a better way to organize wallets, the old code won't suddenly disappear, be forgotten, or be destroyed. You will always be able to find old versions of software that use BIP39 standards, and therefore you can always recreate your keys from your initial seed phrase.
OK, that is very reassuring and what I was trying to get at in the OP. So the only thing I should conceivably worry about is a hard-fork of bitcoin which deprecates entirely the version compatible with BIP39 (admittedly a very, very unlikely, bordering on impossible, thought admittedly we can never say anything to 100%, scenario)?
Charles-Tim: Is there any value in writing down the name and firmware version of the wallet used to generate the keys from the seed words along side the seed or is that just overkill?
Edit: In all this I am thinking of the scenario of bequeathing my bitcoin to my grandchildren (not that I have any, just a scenario) many decades from now. If I leave them only my seed is this likely to be enough for them to recover my/their bitcoin whenever they desired? How much information would they likely need at a minimum?
