Well my point was Maya, and pretty much any other software, have instability issues and bugs too. I personally haven’t had a Blender crash since the 2.5 Alpha releases, but I don’t know if individual experiences are really a useful metric for anything. If you’re crashing even remotely regularly in Blender, file bug reports - Ton and Campbell are practically OCD about crashers and fixes typically come in less than 24 hours.
These threads pop up after every release cycle. People say they want a “stable” Blender but what they usually mean is they want the things they care about fixed, and the things they don’t can be pushed to next cycle. Depending on who you ask, the list of important bug fixes will change. Users often blur ‘stable’ and ‘features’ without realizing it.
I’ve been watching the process of tagging trunk in preparation for version 2.63a on bf-committers and bf-blender-cvs. Fairly delicate maneuverer, really not as simple as I hoped. If I understood something at all, someone who would want to add all appropriate bug fixes to a given release would have to be quite knowledgeable of the code base and SVN procedures, follow the commits closely and tag-tag-tag: dedication.
2.63a will, roughly counting, crush another 100+ bugs. Worth it, wouldn’t you say? I Can’t say enough how lucky I feel being a Blender user and part of this community. There are other nice, helpful folks over at Maya’s and Max communities but Blender’s is of another breed entirely.
The development and maintenance of a product like Blender is vastly complicated. Because it goes in so many different directions, “in such a small space,” bugs and other issues will also seem “concentrated” at times.