When it comes to DAWs in general, the expressions “Russian Roulette” and “House of Cards” come to mind. Honestly, given the “wrong” combination of plugins, system status, status of DAW/System/Plugin health & updates, hardware and drivers, any DAW can be a “Piece of S#^t”.
Just this week I was marveling at how stable my system is with N5.5.4 after I solved a few plugin problems with updates. I’m thinking of imaging the drive now, while everything is stable. I’m a firm believer in stability above all, but unless one company is responsible for a machine, hardware, OS, DAW and plugins from the ground up, then many many things can go wrong with the dependencies that are out of the manufacturer’s control (for example, isn’t the video handled by Quicktime?..).
And sure, it would be great if software was thoroughly debugged before the next generation is released, but in the kind of market they compete in, it’s practically impossible for a DAW manufacturer to stray from the necessity to stimulate sales by including new features before old problems are fixed. Sadly, that’s what keeps the business wheel turning. But while some features aren’t 100%, often some workaround is possible.
BTW, N5.5.5 is an unsupported pre-release. Was 5.5.4 as unreliable for you?