I´m not a Long Time user so i cant talk about Stability and p or Downtime before December 2006, but in this month i´ve seen so many downtimes, ´lag´s, failures and much more, and its really frustrating.
Shure its not easy to maintain a Grid like the SL Grid, but i know many other Companys with MMOG´s too and they have not such problems. So why its impossible for Linden Labs to make the Grid Stable, and also why its neccessary to shut down the grid for every failure or error`?
The best was this day, shortly before the actual downtime i was building on a house and wonder why i cant link some Prims together, no message tells me that my connection was lost, no forced disconnect or anything else, if i dont open the Statistics i would be trying to link until next year.
Second life could be a great game/Developing Plattform, but only if it works, and that also means no extrem lags, not so much downtimes.
If its impossible for you then please hire more employees, cause i pay for this game and i wanna use it and not be frustrated about lags, downtimes and client failures.