Apex 4.0 Upgrade, Not Possible

Well I started looking at my 2011 projects and was getting excited about upgrading of our Oracle Apex version 3.1 to version 4.0 until I found out that Apex version 4.0 requires 10.2.0.3 or higher. Unfortunately the main Apex repository we have is Oracle 9i!! Barring moving the Apex repository (applications) to a different 10g database and setting up database links to "bridge" back to the data in the 9i database (ugly and messy), I am stuck with Apex 3.1 until the 9i database is upgraded to 10g. Unfortunately that is dependent on a lot of non-Apex applications completely out of my control getting modified/upgraded. Oh well.