The original reason I got into Blender was its stability. I’d been working with Maya, but bugs were constantly plaguing me. When I switched over to Blender, I finally could sleep at night, not worrying about the kind of crashing that would happen tomorrow, or the day after.
And while Blender had its limitations, that was fine. Limitations are understood, and can be planned for. Glitches, bugs, well not as much. Unless you read the bug tracker every hour.
Currently, 2.5 is still Alpha. And yes, in Alpha, its normal for some instability. But developers have really been stomping out a lot of bugs. Sadly, even though this is really important, the community doesn’t seem to recognize this.
It seems users either praise bleeding-edge features, or simply ask for more. No one seems to glorify the bug-fixes. So here’s to you, bugfixers. I’d fix them too, if I knew how!
Considering the complexity of a project such as Blender, I have found it to be remarkably stable. Although I have suffered some crashes, I have not found easily repeatable ones. Blender does not easily corrupt its files and with the autosave on it’s unlikely one will lose much work in the occasional crash. That is a fantastic achievement.
Yay for bug fixers!
[...] Plus, the creator is a pretty smart, capable guy. He actually responds to bug reports, and fixes them. And as you know, I owe the world to bug-fixers. [...]