I have held off migration from SL, because this trend of broken releases is concerning me, and I am seeing no evidence of any attempt to control releases properly. In fact I am seeing too much hackering here. This is not the way to convince many people to jump into the software, because there appears to be too much risk that it will keep breaking in future releases, and I never back horses that keep breaking down.
It depends on your benchmark, but do you think you might be seeing more of the open development which acknowledges bugs rather than real problems?
I am just finishing up my end of year accounts with SL and I'm having to manually change the database in several places because SL keeps loosing my stock - I reported this bug to Dieter and was told that the problem did not exists and that he would look into it for some price around $14,000 if I wanted. However, I notice that something which sounds very similar to a bug fix for this has slipped into the latest SL 1.4...
Also I notice that a change very similar to the patch I submitted for changes to the reconciliation screen has also gone into 1.4...
Perhaps it's just "doppler shift"... As the release schedule speeds up and the releases come faster, hence the bug fixes come faster, we naturally think that the rate of bugs has gone up, when in fact it might be the same or lower (it's just we are getting more code more quickly...)
Just consider this for a moment and see if it might not be a reasonable explanation. Also look at the SL changelog for comparison...
However, I don't disagree that in a perfect world we should have a better migration path. Perhaps someone will step up and help work on the migration scripts - these are never easy to write once a project has diverged far enough. I guess that bugs referring to the migration scripts though are the ones that ironically people read most into despite it being a one time bit of pain.
With regards to all the other packaging issues people raise, whilst I can see the merits of using your distro's package manager, at the end of the day CPAN is a fantastic package manager in it's own right and the simple solution is just to do "perl -MCPAN -e shell" and run the list of installations that are required that way. Result is up and running in no time.
Good luck Ed W