I always reinstall and rsync my home directory back and reinstall applications on osx. I never have any of the problems people seem to have here. Just as an anecdotal point.
Upgrades "work" but honestly I don't trust upgrades on any operating system. I'm working on finishing up ansible plays to get things sorted out entirely.
Upgrade if you want, but accept you probably have skeletons in your closet.
If I don't listen those who provide the service, am I going to listen to you? If Apple cannot give me a good solution, why would I buy its product? I know you are good at backing up your files and reinstalling, but I don't want this stuff bother me every release like this. I am just not that free, dude.
Fair enough, but then a followup question, and don't take it the wrong way. If there is a known, os agnostic, way to fix issues with upgrades, and you do not employ that solution, is arguing about upgrading without trying that option productive? I understand you don't listen to the os vendor, but in that case I can't see the logic you'll use as all os's have issues/quirks/edge cases and "trusting trust" of someone. If you're not getting value out of OS X, then honestly you should be moving off it regardless of what anyone says.
As a note, here is how I do the entire thing, I rsync my home dir on each home wifi connect (scripted for years with ControlPlane), and midnight as well. I also rsync before upgrading, then I upgrade the os, rsync again, reinstall the os and rsync home dir back and reinstall vmware.
Sounds hard right? Takes about overnight really most for the rsync back and that just happens while I sleep. I do the same thing for linux/freebsd also. As an example, freebsd 10 upgrade had issues with bhyve not working after upgrading. For linux as an example, things can be markedly worse for things like ubuntu upgrades. Which is/isn't my experience as a (thankfully now ex) devops admin. Nothing is perfect, especially upgrades. That said I have tested the tires out on upgrades of OS X and not really seen issues that others do.
I understand no time, but setting this up, which granted for me is trivial as vmware is about it that I reinstall, the rest is in ~/Applications, means its trivial to not encounter dragons needlessly. I understand you might have the adobe creative suite or whatever installed and reinstalling might be worse than crossing into mordor, but this wisdom is passed on not just by me but from those that came before me. The rsync bit could be improved but I'm lazy and it works well enough.
The first thing I have to think if I want to reinstall instead of upgrade is, how to backup MacTeX & homebrew. I have to consider if it will generate pdf documents correctly. (MacTeX is installed in /usr/texbin/) Reinstalling MacTeX is not that hard compared with reinstalling homebrew. Homebrew, though bottled most package, will take a long time compiling a version gcc with openmp support, let alone recalling who to install. And gcc is not the only thing that need a compiling job. Maybe, years later, I will follow the path of reinstalling or moving back to Linux.
So I compile llvm+gcc often with home-brew, the compile time on my laptop takes total about 5.5 hours. But I setup vagrant and vmware to allow me to automate this all away and create txz's of the install.
And as for mactex it seems to work fine for what I use, though it installs to /usr/local/texlive when I tested it a month ago.
I always reinstall and rsync my home directory back and reinstall applications on osx. I never have any of the problems people seem to have here. Just as an anecdotal point.
Upgrades "work" but honestly I don't trust upgrades on any operating system. I'm working on finishing up ansible plays to get things sorted out entirely.
Upgrade if you want, but accept you probably have skeletons in your closet.