Hmm. While Mavericks isn't the worst version of Mac OS X to date, it definitely is buggy and chunky/slow in many aspects. Panther, Leopard, and Lion gave Mavericks a run for its' money, though. Panther had data loss issues with Firmwire hard drives and was generally buggy; Leopard was slow and sluggish, especially with networking; and Lion...well, let's not even go there.
I think the best versions of Mac OS X were Jaguar, Tiger, Snow Leopard, and Mountain Lion. Generally, the rule of thumb is to wait until 10.x.3, as by then, things pretty much has settled down with the OS. My feeling tells me that Apple rushed 10.9.2 out because of the major SSL issues that were unresolved in 10.9.1, and as a result, some new bugs and unresolved bugs were left in the shipping build of 10.9.2. Hopefully, 10.9.3 will button up those issues and make Mavericks finally more stable and lessen the complaints, but if not, Apple may just move on to 10.10. The cycle of 'every other OS X version being bad' will probably repeat, and 10.10 will be well-loved, just like 10.8 and 10.6 was.