Do audio interface drivers still suck?

I wanted to get a sense from anyone who might be inclined to chat about this.

I have met no engineers with zero complaints about their audio drivers! I appreciate how hard it is to do good DSP, but it seems like there's many corners being cut on software engineering.

I'm using a 6 year old Presonus Firestudio Project (which uses Firewire), and occasionally I switch over to my smaller Scarlett USB2 interface when things get bad. My roommate has a USB3 Steinberg interface, and I've seen all sorts of issues with everything.

The types of issues depend partially on what protocol, partially on the hardware itself, and partially on the levels of software abuse (bussing topology, workload, buffer size, SR, etc).

Here's a few issues off the top of my head which seem to be decoupled from configuration (i.e., doesn't matter what the rest of the Firewire or USB busses look like, or what hardware they're on - all Windows OS).

Presonus Firewire interface:

• Tons of BSODs (probably because the PCIE card is probably dealing with some current transients).
• I can't share my screen and use the microphone at the same time?
• Sometimes when I boot the interface, there's no sign of a new Firewire bus member - takes 3-4 power cycles just to recognize the damn thing.
• The whole PC needs a reboot just to get it to recognize again.

Steinberg USB 3.0 interface:

• Horrible performance - can't keep up with even a few layers at decently large buffer sizes (might be a bad unit, I concede).
• Occasional BSODs
• Crashes other USB devices on the bus.

Scarlett USB 2.0 interface:

• Occasional 3-4 second dropouts.
• Occasional random restarts.
• It won't let you change settings until you reboot. This actually happens on most interfaces I've seen. Still happens even if you kill any app using the driver.
• I must admit this is the most robust software I've used, but it's pretty limited in scope. That seems to be the tradeoff.

(After writing this, I realized that a lot of these issues have to do with the kernel and may be outside of the scope of the interface companies themselves - but maybe they could work with Microsoft to work through Windows-specific bugs, for example).

Some questions to open up discussion:

What issues have yall ran into, and how did you solve them (if you even could)?

Who has the best software support for their interfaces, and are there any with open source? I've heard RME is great but haven't had the pleasure to try.

Are software drivers generally improving over the years? My sample space is small but I've only seen things get worse. I hope others are more optimistic!

Cheers bruvs

EDIT: Thanks for the discussion yall. Pretty interesting imo.