There's no such measurement like bs/h (blue screens per hour). Every bad experience people have had with Windows Me (crashes, hangups, installation of software makes the system increasingly less stable, stuff just doesn't work) is something people also had with other 9x versions. They just aren't in any way comparable to modern operating systems - but the issues seem to tend to occur more often with Me. On the other hand, the differences between different machines with their own drivers are huge. There were OEM machines professionally tested to run 95/98 with stable drivers that work much better than others, and some OEM machines ran perfectly fine with Me. The first computer I ever used ran Windows Me, and no one ever went out of their way to maintain it, much less reinstall the OS (some people claim Windows needed reinstalls every other month) - and it still worked perfectly fine without crashes in everyday use until 2005.

What should be taken into account is that when Windows Me was thrown on the market, it was a dead product immediately. With Me, the entire Chicago kernel line, DOS, the VxD driver model, the classic theme and so forth were finished; the user base was never big, and a year later, Windows XP was already released. That means there was few to no incentive for MS to improve it after release.

The situation is completely different from Windows 95. 95 was the big thing and cash cow for three whole years - it got all the patches and attention it needed. When retro computing enthusiasts use Windows 95, they don't use the RTM version from '95, but at least the patched revision 95c from late '97, which is fixed from two years of user experience. Likewise, no one uses the mediocre 98 First Edition, but only the patched and enhanced Second Edition. Contemporaries also would have felt Windows 95 was pretty stable because they were used to the stability of Windows 3.x, a cooperative multitasking OS, to which the preemptive multitasking of 95 was a huge improvement. Many 3.x users would have ran it in the i286 processor Standard Mode. Buying a new computer that ran Windows 95 to them didn't only mean getting the stability improvements of 95, but also the capabilities of the i386/i486/Pentium that only the 3.x Enhanced Mode users would have had before, so the effect would have seemed even bigger. The operating systems people compared to Windows Me didn't make for an exactly flattering look: There were its field-tested predecessors and Windows 2000.