"I think you've touched on something key: people's acceptance of bugs is often outweighed by the new features they get. In other words, if the "new functionality" is perceived to outweigh the costs of the lack of reliability, the product will be deemed "less buggy" because people "understand" why there are issues."
Right - which is why we have all of the snow leopard nostalgia: because none of the newer releases have given us anything substantive that we really needed to justify the hassle and the bugs.
I am trying to think of something - anything - that compels me to upgrade SL on my mac pro, and all I can think of is that nifty take-a-picture-of-your-signature in the Preview app that you can then insert into PDF documents.
AirPlay; much better multi-display support; tags in Finder; Spotlight enhancements. More than anything, the iCloud/iOS continuity features were also big if you had an iPhone or iPad, everything is just much easier to keep in sync.
I'm a Safari user (better battery usage for the # of tabs I have open) and it too has improved with El Capitan though that's irrelevant for Chrome/FF users.
Handoff is a really useful feature (when it works).
Also SL mamed Expose (that weird non-proportional grid view) that was reverted to the Leopard-style in Mission Control (of which Mavericks/Yosemite had the best implementation, and they've now broken its utility in ElCap thanks to hiding thumbnails by default. FFS.)
But apart from that... I think I preferred the Apple apps back in 2009-or-so.
To be honest, I think the latest Apple release cycles have been more about "remove a feature so that we can add it in again and sell it to our users again". Think multi-monitor support, something that worked perfectly in SL and earlier, and then broke fantastically with the full screen apps in .. Lion? ML? One of the two.
Right - which is why we have all of the snow leopard nostalgia: because none of the newer releases have given us anything substantive that we really needed to justify the hassle and the bugs.
I am trying to think of something - anything - that compels me to upgrade SL on my mac pro, and all I can think of is that nifty take-a-picture-of-your-signature in the Preview app that you can then insert into PDF documents.
Ok, and maybe USB3 ?
That's all I can think of.