A bulk of Vista's reliability issues were from drivers. As long as the drivers you had were fine, Vista was also fine. I jumped on Vista in 2007 when I got a laptop with it. Then I moved my desktop to it from XP shortly after. I had zero reliability issues with it.

The only other issue I had with Vista was more or less other developers being dumb. Vista was the first Windows OS to force everyone to run all apps with limited privileges (because it's a great security measure, Linux does the same thing). Apps that expected you were running with elevated privileges failed in ways that weren't obvious.

Vista was a-ok from my memory. I had a pleasant experience with it for the 4 years I used it 

I was told this: As long as you had the latest hardware at the time, it was pretty good. It was with older, slower hardware where Vista partly got its bad rep. Manufactures wanted to sell what they still had with Vista, so they did. That's where all those "Certified for Windows Vista" stickers come from.

I remember when Vista came out, my dad bought a prebuilt PC (Dell I think) that had the latest and most baller hardware for the time. Vista never actually gave us issues (short of user error trying to get used to it from XP).