> Except the annual release cycle actually started with Mountain Lion, which was 1 year after Lion, and High Sierra was also 1 year after Sierra, but you put them in the "the glory days of OS X stability".
They mean what I said, but I'm certain now that instead, you did this, but let's see if this helps
>>>> Leopard to Mountain Lion were the glory days of OS X stability,
COMMA (NEXT STATEMENT AND NEW THOUGHT)-->
>>>> with Snow Leopard, Mountain Lion, and High Sierra standing out as focusing on bug fixes rather than introducing new features (and new bugs).
> I was talking about how macOS annoyingly advertises new major updates, for example in Software Update, and even permanently badging your System Preferences Dock icon until you upgrade.
I don't think your words said what you meant and/or I made a poor assumption by your use of "pushing" in the context of "updates" or upgrades. Apple did start to push out security patches for supported OS versions, but you meant notices, or nags, of available OS upgrades. These can be avoided by disabling push notifications via the gui[1] or more permanently using the Terminal and launchd to disable push notifications:
sudo launchctl unload -w /System/Library/LaunchAgents/com.apple.notificationcenterui.plist
sudo launchctl unload -wF /System/Library/LaunchDaemons/com.apple.softwareupdate*
sudo defaults write /Library/Preferences/com.apple.SoftwareUpdate AutomaticDownload -boolean FALSE
[1] https://www.businessinsider.com/guides/tech/how-to-turn-off-...
[2] http://tech.masterofsql.com/os-x/unload-disable-unwanted-age...
[3] https://gist.github.com/mvanbaak/e98b7b622ea2c8ab626d51cb88e...
[4] https://github.com/mathiasbynens/dotfiles/blob/main/.macos
> This was my major point.
I don't think your words said what you thought you might have meant: "with Snow Leopard, Mountain Lion, and High Sierra standing out as focusing on bug fixes rather than introducing new features (and new bugs)"
Major updates never focus on bug fixes rather than introducing new features (and new bugs). Otherwise they wouldn't need major updates at all, they'd just keep releasing minor bug fix updates. There's nothing really special about 10.6.0 (Snow Leopard), 10.8.0 (Mountain Lion), or 10.13 (High Sierra) compared to other major releases. These were all much buggier than the previous stable release.
> Yes, thank you, this is the entire point of my criticism of annual upgrades in that a year is not enough time to fix bugs before introducing instability and new bugs in a major release.
Except the annual release cycle actually started with Mountain Lion, which was 1 year after Lion, and High Sierra was also 1 year after Sierra, but you put them in the "the glory days of OS X stability".
> Apple isn't pushing upgrades, and I don't think the OS can be configured to upgrade automatically, only update.
I wasn't talking about automatic upgrades, I was talking about how macOS annoyingly advertises new major updates, for example in Software Update, and even permanently badging your System Preferences Dock icon until you upgrade. This didn't occur in the days when major updates were on physical discs.