Vista is just too ahead of it's time. In 3 years when everything has been updated it will probably be the most stable release yet.

and Me was not a mistake, it wasn't overly rushed. It showed the limitations of the DOS based architecture. The only big problem it had was the whole restricted real-mode DOS access. All in all I believe it to be the best 9x release out there, though a far cry from XP

 

Most people call this stage "Beta" and do not release it.

 

If it weren't released there would be no one writing programs for it, and therefore it would never fully mature.

99% of the time when there is a problem with "windows" it has more to do with poorly written third party code.