It really seems like we are playing different games. Did you play Civ V? For many months it was terribly buggy with crashes and all sorts of issues. I still get texture bugs in that game, and the AI often does some wonky stuff. While I think FE can certainly be improved--and I certainly hope they do--I'm having a good time playing it at the moment and I have not crashed once (I started playing with version 1.12). I'm encouraged that Stardock developers are posting in the forums and seem to be continuing to work on AI and other updates. Strategy games like Civ V and FE are often a bit of a work in progress.
I did not play Civ V either because there were very convincing negative reports about it. (The one unit per tile feature in particular.) Civ V plays in a different league anyway.
When I read those "It has some bugs, but nothing game-breaking." posts, I get the same feeling (about playing different games). I also started playing with version 1.12 although I had bought the game earlier. FE crashed several times already in the first hour. That did not put me off too much. That autosaves are not reliable, however, made me very suspicious. I noticed that my units lose movement points without moving, the AI does not play according to the same rules, data you see or read on the screen are not always correct - sometimes different parts of the world even seem to disagree about known facts (due to multithreading?), the UI is cumbersome and does strange things, ... In short, every time I looked more closely (because I wanted to find out exactly what was going on - after all I was still learning), I always discovered some weird behavior. So my only explanation is that some (most?) players just don't pay much attention to what is really happening. And that's the only way to have fun with this game at present.
The second part of the story is that Stardock seems to have withdrawn all the developers (except Derek Paxton and Brad "Frogboy" Wardell) ATM and even those two are working on fairly insignificant details. Normally, if you hurry release to get your game out before the Christmas season, you should be prepared to follow up with one or two big patches early on. Even more so if your product contains several known bugs, not only numerous yet undiscovered bugs because of the usual sloppy testing.
It seems to me that quality drops in general. That's because new games become ever more complex, but probably also because customers buy them anyway. It also seems to me that FE is among the worse examples. (From what I've read I would infer that Civ V, for example, never had the same kind of bugs like FE - bugs in the game engine itself. I consider those bugs the most serious. A game without rules isn't a game at all.)
