I have used unstable as my main desktop for over a decade now.[1] At first there were occasional issues but these went away as I became more experienced with debian. It has been years since I encountered a bug that caused me to lose more than an hour of productivity. The most recent issue that I have had with unstable was over a year ago and it was simply a matter of pinning a version of libcairo. The only reason I remember this so well is that someone else on HN was having trouble and my comment[2] on how to fix it was my highest rated comment at the time.

[1] To be honest I actually run a mixed system with a few packages (not just oneoffs but big things like xmonad/iceweasel/awesome/git/pandoc/git-annex/gitit) from experimental. If it has been a long time (5-7 years) since you tried unstable you can think of experimental as what unstable used to be.

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3907796