One of the things that people using open source often wish loudly for (via) is software that's stable and only gets bug fixes, including security updates, with no other changes at all. Oh, and they want this for free as part of an open source project.

As you may have guessed, there is a fundamental problem with this. Indeed it is a classical fundamental problem in software development in general, namely that doing only maintenance is boring and very few people want to do it (especially for free, such as with open source software). This is why it's really quite hard to find anyone who does a good job of maintenance, especially over the long term and most especially for free. There are people who will provide you with well maintained systems that stay carefully stable for years, but generally they want money (often a fair amount of it).

But why is maintenance boring? Well, I have a theory about that. One of the problems with maintenance is that it consists of not doing things. If the software is working, people want you to not touch anything. If the software is not working, people want you to touch as little as possible and generally to make the smallest change possible. Almost all of the time, change is risk and instability and the people who are agitating for 'stable software, bugfixes only' don't want any of that. Even internal restructuring will make them unhappy with you, and don't even think of adding new features.

(Some people will say that they'll accept new features or performance improvements. Generally they turn out to be either wrong or demand impossible standards, like 'sure, new features and better performance, but absolutely no chance anything old breaks'.)

In the commercial software world, you can sometimes get what you want here by paying people money (not always, though). In a pure open source world with no money changing hands, you're in a quest for extremely rare people and you aren't likely to find them, especially in projects which are not basically finished (and most of them aren't).

(Commercial software would like your support and maintenance money, but they would also like the money from new customers and people making major upgrades. Getting the latter often means changing and improving the software, whether you like it or not.)