I would like to echo this concern, which has been bothering me more and more since the release of Blender 2.8.
While I appreciate the new features as much as everyone, it has been a frustration watching old bugs getting carried over in every new stable release since the 2.8 upgrade on basic functionality that hamper basic workflow.
Moreover, the definition of what constitutes a bug and the line that delineates a feature from a bug seems to have been blurred. Too often, something that isn’t working as it’s supposed gets disqualified and set aside as a requested ‘feature,’ and taken off the bug list. A bug should simply be defined as something that’s not working as it was intended to. Pure and simple.
Having developed software myself, I also realize that there is much greater personal satisfaction in writing new code for new functionality, such as geometry nodes and an asset browser, than the dreary duty of debugging code that was probably written by someone else. However, there is real and obvious danger in building new functionality on top of a buggy base platform.
What good is an asset browser for your rigged characters when the ‘bone heat’ algorithm for skinning and retargeting using automatic weights doesn’t work at all and you have to spend hours or days trying to manually fix the weights on face rigs? Or, what do you do when you can’t use background/reference/camera background images while modeling because the opacity of the reference cannot be adjusted? (Apparently a longstanding driver issue with Intel CPUs and GPUs.) Then there is the compositor, the NLA editor, the armatures clashing with the pose library, to mention just a few.
We are usually at least one stable release behind with actual work because we can’t afford to lose both backward compatibility and bug-related functionality of an update. This is to be expected with new releases.
However, bugs that persist through several releases remain a great concern.
That being said, I’m really appreciative of all the effort that has gone into the latest developments of this fantastic piece of software. Cycles X, geometry nodes, the asset browser to mention just a few - these are major milestones. So to any Blender developer reading this - thanks for all you’re doing.