Shouldn't "rock solid feel" be taken for granted these days?

I don't see how a "rock solid feel" can be considered a selling point, not for about the last ten years.

"no bugs, glitches or crashes". Crikey, that should be par for the course.

Solaris and FreeBSD, which I've used for years, have always had a "rock solid feel". RedHat in the pre RHEL versions often used to have that feel - I'm referring to 5.2, 6.2 and so on. Even Win2K was rock solid. NT was crap, of course.

Having just started to use Linux again regularly after a few years minimal use, I'm rather surprised to see just how bloated some distros have become. Centos is heavy man, like 60s heavy. A huge download. It's almost as though Linux distro authors (if that is the right term) are intent on using up a machine's resources come what may.

Fedora may be good, I don't know, but I'm not going to make a huge download just to get a "rock solid" system when I already have one.