I think the argument here is that stability is gained from having code shared as closely as possible with the Windows codebase, which is where most of the QA work happens, and what the real experts debugging their ASICs use.

From a hardware and driver development standpoint, I think that makes a decent amount of sense. Hardware is often weird and quirky, so making sure you handle all the edge cases in two different codebases is a lot harder than doing it once. Certainly too much work for a handful of people who just want to plug their code into Linux.

Stability here is on the driver/hardware interaction, not the kernel/driver boundary, which is what the kernel folks seem to care about, naturally.