I agree some part of your rant and share some of your feelings about "half-done right" product but still I´m thinking that do (I´m not pointing at you) people realize that they have full power to brake basic functionalities just by installing 3rd party software. Almost every single part of maemo OS is vulnerable to crappy 3rd party coding (especially widgets that depend on python seem to take system to knees after couple of days). Sad thing is that spotting problems is really really hard. You can´t just run "process explorer" a´la Windows and spot issues just by looking nice GUI with neatly grouped statistics and say "ahaa. You crappy widget, daemon, app etc. you are eating all my memory".

and about multitasking. I rarely multitask with this phone. I would like to keep e-mail client on always, but well, it´s incarnation of Belzebub and it is just horrific blast from past. (btw. is it possible to completely unload modest without braking anything?). Normally I have Notes always open and sometimes browser. I would say that 3-4 programs open at most when multitasking.