30 years ago or so I worked at a tiny networking company where several coworkers came from a small company (call it C) that made AppleTalk routers. They recounted being puzzled that their competitor (company S) had a reputation for having a rock-solid product, but when they got it into the lab they found their competitor's product crashed maybe 10 times more often than their own.
It turned out that the competing device could reboot faster than the end-to-end connection timeout in the higher-level protocol, so in practice failures were invisible. Their router, on the other hand, took long enough to reboot that your print job or file server copy would fail. It was as simple as that, and in practice the other product was rock-solid and theirs wasn't.
(This is a fairly accurate summary of what I was told, but there's a chance my coworkers were totally wrong. The conclusion still stands, I think - fast restarts can save your ass.)