[stoppingdown]

"both properties have nothing to do with update frequencies."

They do because it might happen, as described, that your system becomes obsolete as you are forced to upgrade the o.s. and discover that you're no more compatible. Solid and reliable presuppose "runnable". ;-)

For the other comments... There are many ways in which I wish CO was better, including parts of the UI. Yes, there are signs of programmers' laziness. But it delivers and I'm pretty pleased by the quality of the outcoming images.

Coming to your last paragraph, I understand the point. The fact is that we're in the hands of software companies and that's bad. Not only for photography, of course: for instance, for years I've been used Opera Mail as my email client. It was the best option available in my evaluation. The UI was very good and in particular I appreciated the tagging facilities. Unfortunately it was extremely fragile with respect of crashes: I mean, they occurred rarely, max. twice per year, but at this point a mess happened with the internal database, incapable - by design - of recovering. But I was able to deal with it by means of a good backup strategy. Then, at a certain point... they dropped the product. Now Thunderbird is as good, so I'm happy with it, but migration was a PITA (not yet completed) because there are no ways to import rules, and I have hundreds. Lots of manually work to do.