Honestly, I couldn't disagree more. Audacity is one of the buggiest pieces of open source software I've used. Audio routinely gets corrupted or lost. Their "known issues" page is comically long, and little ever gets fixed.
I have a lot of love for them for making audio editing accessible to the masses, but I wish a team would clean the app up like the LibreOffice folks did to OpenOffice.
Sure, but like, the licensing works well for me. :)
Also, I don't know who decided to put a "Find out about LibreOffice Vanilla..." banner in that damn app, which appears Every. Time. I. Open. The. App. now. They need to be taken out back and code-reviewed harshly. It's not like LibreOffice is without many horrendous flaws either.
Oh yeah, it did crash a lot and would get into weird states that would make it hard to recover. Oddly, commercial editing software, even late versions, also had weird corruption issues from time to time, usually when plugins are involved.
You have to be doing something wrong or have something wrong with your setups. I've literally never had that happen in light to heavy use across 5 installations.
It's not hard to find others with problems. Look at the McElroy podcast archive: they alone lost numerous episodes because Audacity just didn't record any audio. My podcasting friends have ended up with corrupt Audacity save files (sometimes after a crash, sometimes just because), requiring a painful recovery process involving stitching together hundreds of scratch files.
If it were just me, I'd agree with you. But it's so common that I don't consider it a viable way to edit audio.
Edit: in thinking about it, one of the friends I record with often actually records with both Audacity and another app, just because Audacity fails so often.
I have a lot of love for them for making audio editing accessible to the masses, but I wish a team would clean the app up like the LibreOffice folks did to OpenOffice.