I'm guessing that you're even looking at this because you either have an old Open Directory host that can't be upgraded past 10.7.5 Lion, and/or that you're in the process of upgrading and migrating.
Okay, so to paraphrase your question and what you're faced with here, your choice involves having a consistent implementation of Open Directory using consistent software versions, or to override the existing version lockouts here and try to use different and variously incompatible and rather less-tested combinations of Open Directory versions across your authentication servers.
If access is important enough to have replicated Open Directory servers and likely replicated DNS and related, then get everything to at least Yosemite and probably preferably to El Capitan. Now if this was a business that was considering replication, then your business outage costs are probably far higher than the cost of a (new or used) Mac mini or other small box that can run Yosemite or El Capitan. For a less-critical environment or for a family environment, I'd likely do a reinstallation and a migration and get that OD data transferred over to the new server.
Or the shorter version: can I override the lockouts? Probably. But do you really want to do that? With your directory servers?
