The range operators are important, else you'd never be able to resolve 2 packages that want a similar versioned sup-dependency e.g. jquery 1.12 because without range operators those 2 packages would have declared minor version differences (1.12.1 and 1.12.3) depending on when they were published. This would mean you'd always end up with duplicated dependencies.

I'd argue 'node_modules is big' is not a fault of npm. If the package or app you're trying to install generates a large node_modules dir, that is something you should take up with the package maintainer. See buble vs babel - buble has a way smaller dep tree.

npm is only slow in the ways that all other package managers are, when installing large dependency trees or native dependencies (like libSass) and it is way faster than say pip and rubygems in this regard. When I 'pip install -r requirements.txt' at work, I literally go and make a coffee.

Also never experienced any instability, though I may have been lucky. Certainly it has been very stable for the last year or so when I've been working with a lot. Could you elaborate on why it is crap on Windows? I did think all major issues (e.g. deep nesting problem) were now fixed ...