Ah heck bloom....all video card drivers have problems regardless who makes them.
Uhmmm,...I took some time to try to duplicate quite a few of the problems listed in those articles, and the only ones I could duplicate were related to the anti-alias stuff, which I already knew existed.
You really cannot compare the previous Rage and earlier drivers to the Radeon. I, like you, have suffered through all the plagues of problems with ATI's earlier cards/drivers, but the Radeon is not like anything ATI has ever released.
I could find tons of problems with every other ATI product I ever had, but I am having troubles finding problems with the Radeon and its drivers.
Sure, the first drivers were pretty lousy, but that is pretty much true of NVidia's first release for new product drivers as well.
I expect the first drivers for the Radeon 2 to be buggy too.
At least for Windows 95/98, the drivers got fixed pretty fast and without a dozen releases. I think ATI has officially released 4 drivers for the Radeon since it started shipping.
You have been tainted by ATI, and so have I, but I went ahead and tried the Radeon,..and despite having a Hercules GF2 Ultra 64MB card here, I ended up keeping the Radeon.
My two bits.