I'm just tired of hearing of all these bugs making everyone's phone unusable and yet no one providing a list of concrete examples. Instead I see just what you're describing where people are describing individual little things they experienced and projecting it as a whole "this OS is a mess" type thing. How is that any more valid than my experience.
I would just love to see a list of all these bugs. Anyway, if Apple really is dedicating a year to them, I don't want a generic we focused on stability this time around. I hope they do an actual run down of all the biggest bugs they fixed. That would at least be interesting. Just like when they say we have 10 new features to focus on, I would love if they detailed specifically what they did for these issues. That way I can at least know what people were facing.
And then next year when they launch all these new features like the rumoured home screen redesign and all this other stuff, we can repeat the cycle of bug exaggeration. Or again, all these leaks are BS. I kind of hope the actual meaning of these leaks is not that they will deliberately hold back features to fix bugs, but that they aren't going to announce things that may not be ready, like messages in the cloud or payments in iMessage. Instead they'll just keep those under wraps until they're confident they can ship.
I somewhat agree that things were exaggerated, but to be honest there was a slew of emergency releases in the first month or two. iOS11 got off to an extremely rough start.
One to fix the cracking sound in their brand new iPhone 8. Another to fix the unresponsive screens in cold weather on their brand new iPhone X. Another to fix the really embarrassing auto-correct bug where you couldn't type the letter "i" without it changing into "A [?]" or whatever (imo THIS is what tanked iOS11's reputation). Another emergency fix where typing a single Indian character in iMessage could completely crash a phone. The HomeKit vulnerability fix. Spectre wasn't really their fault but that fix occured during the same timeframe. Etc etc.
There was also controversy about the WiFi/BT control center toggles not actually turning that stuff off. And the 3D Touch in the app switcher being removed. And the really stupid calculator animation bug that made the calculator app unusable/unreliable. And of course the huge battery throttling controversy. Those are just the ones I remember off the top of my head. And this was
after a lot the big tentpole iOS11 features (AirPlay 2, HomePod, Apple Pay cash, Messages in iCloud, wireless charging) got delayed to future point updates so they could focus on getting things under control at launch.
To Apple's credit they did fix things fast most of the time. But for regular folks it's super annoying to have to install updates every week, especially for those who barely have any free space on their iDevices. I don't think it's such a bad idea to take a year off and really polish things.