so hardware that worked with every previous os x is not from a reputed vendor?
Sometimes, or one that doesn't care to follow up support for new version of an OS. Canon comes to mind, their scanner and printer driver support has sucked since Panther.
And again, this is not an OS X-only problem.
So, Apple doesn't support an implementation of Windows Server that's more than 7 years old and has seen no updates? Gee, no wonder I wasn't having problems... I keep my servers' software up to date. Silly me.
like i said if your set-up is simple you might not have issues.
And like
I said, the problem is more often with situations where edge cases exist - as they do on all platforms - where either the vendor or the user has decided to be lax on support. Not being bitten by these issues doesn't automatically mean that a user is "basic," or that you have special knowledge above them (actually, one might argue it could actually suggest the opposite, in some cases). There are lots of users with advanced configurations that have managed this upgrade just fine.
Operating systems evolve and improve, and older APIs and programming classes deprecate over time. If these things are ignored, yup, you're going to have problems.
Mavericks is not new
or unique in this regard. All you have to do is look in the history of this and other forums where every OS X release has been billed the worst OS ever by someone grousing because their old software or hardware stopped working due to support abandonment. And you'll see it in Microsoft-specific forums and linux-specific forums too. And in all cases, it's incorrect to assume that ALL users worthy of an "advanced" platform are having problems, and that people who aren't should all really just have the computer taken away from them because they only really need an iPad, anyway.
but there are people with thousands of files in thousands of folders and os x just doesn't want to load the file structure
Really? I have a half-full 22TB NAS that Mavericks-running-Macs connect to all the time, both Haswell and pre-Haswell models, and they "load the file structure" all the time, assuming "load the file structure" means correctly display all files and directories and access/open/write files without difficulty or file corruption. Again, it's worked better for under Mavericks than Lion or Mountain Lion, where I had all kinds of issues.
what about the crappy preview performance
Hasn't been crappy for me.
and the fact that quicklook doesn't support half the file types it used to, or that quicktime is actually avfoundation and can't be extended with codecs
This I'll give you, Quicktime X has been pretty badly hobbled. But Quicktime X has been for "basic" users, as you so nicely put it, for several versions now. There are other players that could and should be used, instead of that tripe.
