Example: ubutnu cannot consistently ship a version of network manager that supports reconnecting to a wifi network suspend with out being manually restarted.

I suspect that at a dollar value there is most no point but I don't have access to enough data to prove it.

Your experience is limited, and tainted. wpa-supplicant by itself can accomplish what you desire; NetworkManager (poorly) adds three or four extra layers of abstraction on top of that.

Meanwhile, Wicd and connman do exactly what you need, and don't constantly crash while doing it.

Blame ubuntu for following Red Hat's lead, and using their "solutions" to the problem.