> The same people might be scourging for hours on ubuntuforums because Ubuntu filled up their /boot partition with obsolete kernels and won't boot anymore. But its still perceived as "stable".

This is totally unacceptable. I started using ubuntu in production thinking it was "stable". After 6 months, the server wouldn't boot because of this reason. I don't think I ever manually installed updates. It just updated itself and broke itself.