> a release that doesn't have gratuitous UI churn and superficial changes

There have actually been quite a few of those releases. Some of the California-themed updates have been practically indistinguishable from the previous versions. Of course Tahoe and Big Sur brought huge UI changes, but those are the exceptions, not the norm.

> focuses on deep-seated and long-standing issues under the hood

Which issues would those be, specifically?

> If the right thing for the OS in the long term is to replace an entire subsystem

Which subsystems need replacement? You claim that this is what people mean by wanting another Snow Leopard, but which subsystems do people want replaced?

> misses the point of Snow Leopard

I haven't missed the point of Snow Leopard. You're conflating two entirely different things: (1) the point of Snow Leopard as conceived by Apple in 2008-ish and (2) why people in 2025 look back fondly at Snow Leopard. My claim is that the fond memories are the result of the quality and stability that were themselves the result of 2 full years of bug fixes AFTER the initial release of Snow Leopard. Whereas the initial quality of Snow Leopard was not great, just like the initial quality of all major OS updates is not great. Major updates invariably make software buggier, and the quality comes only after much time spent refining the new stuff.

My contention is that the marketing lie of "no new features", which is naturally very memorable, is the reason that a lot of people associate Snow Leopard with bug fixes and quality, but that's not actually what 10.6.0 brought, and the quality came much later in time.

I'm not saying that Snow Leopard didn't bring valuable changes. I'm just saying that Snow Leopard existed in various stages over 2 years, and the high quality version of Snow Leopard that we remember fondly now is actually late-stage Snow Leopard, not early-stage Snow Leopard, and those 2 years of minor bug fix releases were crucial. Moreover, that's what we need now, a long series of minor bug fix updates, not any new major updates. The bug backlog has become a mountain.

> Of course a release that makes changes as fundamental as re-writing the Finder and QuickTime to use the NeXT-derived frameworks rather than the classic Mac OS APIs, and moving most of the built-in apps to 64-bit, is going to introduce or uncover plenty of new bugs.

Which is why I think it's very wrong to claim that people want "another Snow Leopard". Snow Leopard II released in 2026 would be much buggier than even macOS Tahoe, which is precisely what people do NOT want, a bunch more bugs.

> But it fixed a bunch of stubborn bugs

Which bugs exactly?

> Fixing architectural bugs is still fixing bugs

Which architectural bugs do you have in mind, or more relevantly, which architectural bugs do people in general have in mind when saying that they want another Snow Leopard?