You know, I've always thought Tiger was the last svelte OS from apple. It was a tight, fast OS that was very stable. Leopard appeared while it had lots of features, it was less ram friendly then its predecessor
Have to agree there. I have tiger 10.4.11 on my 2003 G4 Powermac. Boots and shuts down faster than latest Snow Leopard on Mac Pro late 2006 with 5GB RAM. While everything else (as expected) runs faster on the Mac Pro config than the older Mac, Tiger is a far more stable beast. The leopards in my experience have been far more quirky in their behaviors with one scenario where all the apps lock up and can't be quit, to an extent that one has to hard power off the Mac. Seen same thing happen on brothers Mac.
My suspicion has been that Mac OS X development has been less than stellar since the advent of IOS for iPhone/iPod Touch. And, some of the features and omission of functionality in OS X in the last few years has been targeted as being a fun experience for IOS users and less as professional OS.
For Lion I am going to give Apple the benefit of the doubt. I am going to get an extra 4GB for the Mac and a new HD and do a very clean install i.e not use any of the time machine options and install all my pro apps one by one and leave out as much unnecessary stuff as possible.
I have one other issue with Sleep not working, and yes I know, can be caused by some USB device. The thing is though I still have my original Tiger install on an internal drive and it has no sleep issues on the same hardware configuration.