That's generally true about the overall stability, the DB popped constantly.
One reason Emid got grief was because it started barfing every time sprocs, table schemas, views, etc were changed and nobody ever really managed to resolve this. The DBA's would update the text of a sproc without telling anyone and Emid would start throwing exceptions. Certainly a set of fixable problems, but nobody ever really got a good mental model of when it needed to be HUP'd.
"Emid uses psycopg, ergo we have to rewrite the whole thing" was one of the insane justifications tossed around for the rewrite project. Never made any sense.
The business issue motivating removing the middle layer altogether was just that to do anything you needed to change three things in three different programming languages (maybe four if it involved JS or Flash), and this was foolish.