> Snow Leopard's stated goal internally was reducing bugs and increasing quality. That is a fact, not marketing.

That being a stated goal is not necessarily contradictory with claims that the release introduced bugs and had quality problems. Fixing bugs can introduce new bugs, or unveil existing bugs that were previously hidden by other bugs. It's quite possible that users like the author encountered bugs in their workflows that were the result of fixing bugs that didn't impact their workflows. It's also possible that they used applications that relied on behavior that was considered bugs in the OS, and thus broke when the bug was fixed.