+1. I think it's often forgotten in the ongoing debate over rooting/custom roms vs. stock that the choice is sometimes based on the requirements that a Droid must meet, not the expertise of the user. I don't have the luxury of having a Droid that exhibits odd behavior triggered by a rom that, while perhaps very well designed, has no support other than a small community of developers who may or may not be available to fix problems.
A case in point is a known bug in voice search in the 2.1 update that does not enable a user to dial a number from a google result set. I'm confident that the bug is being addressed and will be fixed promptly. And the fact that it has been reported to Google by literally dozens of users largely eliminates "user error" and "odd configuration" as explanations.
Ahh...very true...but in Smoked Glass I can dial a number from a google result set. So you kind of blew your own point.
Nate
I don't think so. In fact, over the last month or so I detect a rather significant shift in the overall tone of many of the posts here. In February and March the weight of opinion was more or less that only wimps fail to root their phones and install custom roms. On the other hand, I've seen a number of posts in the last few weeks from people who encounter issues with no obvious solutions asking for help from rom developers, at least some of whom have moved on.
I have no quarrel with those whose phones are basically toys they can afford to play with and risk encountering problems that can only be solved by the good graces of other hackers. It's an enjoyable hobby.
For many of us, however, it's important to know that when we do encounter a bug we can ignore the issue of whether a modified operating system with a very small community of fellow users is at fault.
All software has bugs, as I'm sure you realize. Uncovering those bugs is the first step to resolving them. And the larger the community of users with the same software configurations, the faster the bugs are uncovered and the faster that individual differences in configurations can be ruled out.