Yah I recall that 10.2 seemed like first version of Mac OS X that had a lot of kinks worked out. Each release thereafter got better and faster. Apple had one solid release after another throughout the aughts.

Yup, but it was worth it to escape the various errors that could take down the OS at a moments notice depending on the software you were running. Not loosing my unsaved/unauto-saved Word documents because of an iTunes or IE crash was huge.