It's not that Snow Leopard had fewer bugs than its successors, but that it was the last update which clearly had fewer bugs than its predecessors. Since then, each new version has changed things around without seeming to make life better overall.
What's more, as the iOS tail has come to wag the Mac OS dog, Apple's concept of an "improvement" has increasingly diverged from mine. Most of the things they've added since Snow Leopard have ranged from useless to annoying as far as I'm concerned. I don't want an app store, I don't understand workspaces, the new fullscreen mode makes my second monitor worthless. Every new version seems to have new hotkeys and swipe gestures that do strange and incomprehensible things when I trigger them by accident, which I would disable if I had any idea what they were called or where to look for their settings.
I don't think this is just an age thing, either, or a romanticism about the past; my family got our first Macintosh in 1985, and I have used every single version of Mac OS since System 0.9. There have definitely been better and worse eras. I have nostalgic feelings about System 5, and to a lesser extent about Mac OS 8. I don't so much feel nostalgic about 10.6.8 as I have simply felt annoyed by each update since.
What's more, as the iOS tail has come to wag the Mac OS dog, Apple's concept of an "improvement" has increasingly diverged from mine. Most of the things they've added since Snow Leopard have ranged from useless to annoying as far as I'm concerned. I don't want an app store, I don't understand workspaces, the new fullscreen mode makes my second monitor worthless. Every new version seems to have new hotkeys and swipe gestures that do strange and incomprehensible things when I trigger them by accident, which I would disable if I had any idea what they were called or where to look for their settings.
I don't think this is just an age thing, either, or a romanticism about the past; my family got our first Macintosh in 1985, and I have used every single version of Mac OS since System 0.9. There have definitely been better and worse eras. I have nostalgic feelings about System 5, and to a lesser extent about Mac OS 8. I don't so much feel nostalgic about 10.6.8 as I have simply felt annoyed by each update since.