The Reinstall Is the Feature
Buy a retro handheld and the actual hobby starts before a single game loads. Flash the SD card. Sort the ROMs into folders that match whatever frontend you picked. Hunt down the right BIOS files, the box art, the metadata that makes the library look finished instead of like a pile of zip files with numbers for names. Get all of that right and the device works exactly as advertised: you turn it on, pick a game, and play it.
Then, somehow, the thing that was supposed to be the whole point starts feeling like the afterthought. A lot of people who do this will tell you, if you ask, that the setup was the good part.
Same shape with Linux distros. Someone runs Arch for a while, hits a wall with the AUR or a kernel update that breaks something, switches to Debian for stability, and Debian is in fact stable. Updates don't break things. The system sits there working, quietly, for months. And then they go back to Arch anyway, not because Arch got better at anything Debian was failing at, but because stable stopped being interesting roughly the week it started being true.
The easy read is that this is restlessness, or an addiction to novelty, or a failure to commit. I don't think that's it. I think the actual object of the hobby was never the working system. It was the arc from broken to working: the error messages, the forum thread that almost applies to your situation, the config file edited for the third time, the moment it finally boots. That arc has a start and an end. The end is a stable system. Once you're there, the thing you were doing is, definitionally, over. Calling that boredom and treating it as evidence the hobby soured mistakes the exit condition for a destination you failed to enjoy.
This explains a pattern that otherwise looks irrational: people chasing the same fix repeatedly instead of learning it once and keeping the result. If the value were in having a stable, working, properly configured system, you'd expect convergence, everyone eventually settling somewhere and staying. Instead you get cycles. Reinstall, configure, stabilize, get bored, reinstall. The system you end up with each time is roughly interchangeable with the last one. What's not interchangeable is the two weeks of narrowing down why audio stopped working after a kernel bump. That's the part that doesn't survive the install finishing.
It shows up anywhere the setup labor is separable from the use. People who rebuild their note-taking system every eighteen months, migrating years of files between apps that do roughly the same thing, aren't dissatisfied with their notes. They're dissatisfied with having nothing left to configure. A home network that's been running flawlessly for a year starts attracting a new router, a new VLAN scheme, a reason to re-architect something that wasn't broken. The stable state isn't a failure state for these setups. It's just not where the activity lives, and treating it as the goal means every success quietly converts into a stopping point with nothing left to do.
None of this means stability doesn't matter, obviously it does, for anything you actually depend on. It means the people who keep walking away from stable systems they built themselves aren't failing to appreciate what they made. They got exactly what they were after, which is why there's nothing left to go back for.