I run (unofficial) Cyanogenmod and mostly like it, but I wouldn't wish it on anyone. Every release has a little something important broken. Don't get me wrong, I'm very grateful to the people doing this stuff for free, but when your battery life suddenly gets cut in half and you have to choose between a working camera in the newest release or short battery life, it gets to be a PITA. Plus, it's a time sink...
Seriously -- you're using an unsupported community build of CM with god-knows-what kernel and you think this is a representative experience??
I'm not sure what to say to FUD like that, except that official CM builds are very carefully vetted (there still isn't an official "stable" build of Android 4.2, for example, even six months after the 4.2 codebase was merged and an enormous number of fixes and changes applied since). But I've never seen any issues like what you're complaining about, even running nightly builds (which I've been doing since 2010).
The other major piece of misinformation in your post is claiming it's a time sink. It's not. For some considerable time now, CM has shipped with a CM-updater utility that will (as an option) check regularly for new builds (you can specify whether or not you want nightlies, experimental releases, stable releases included) and will download any updates. On your acceptance of a prompt, the new build will be installed and the device rebooted without the user having to do or manage anything -- it's that simple. No messing about with recovery, no downloading files from XDA, no mess, no fuss. It's all automagic, and it works perfectly, so much so that current builds actually disable the ability to manually reboot into recovery by default. The whole process is just as easy, in fact, as installing an update from your carrier. (But of course, you wouldn't be aware of any of the above as you're not running an official CM build.)
The great thing about open source software is that anyone can take CM's codebase and build their own ROM for any particular unsupported brand of phone. But please don't judge some half-baked, buggy XDA community build with the quality that's coming out of cyanogenmod right now.