Comment by roryirvine

It was a similar story with Pulseaudio - it caused pain for early adopters but, by the time that Debian stable switched to it by default, almost all of the issues and corner cases had long since been worked out and it was almost completely trouble-free.

Mind you, the libc5 -> glibc2 upgrade was pretty horrible in Debian land, so they didn't always get it right in the early days...