What programmer will confidently concludes he's actually fixed a randomly occurring bug, when he makes an educated change to the code, that, without knowing for certain WHY, causes the problem to no longer appear in testing?

Observation is not an infallible fountain of truth. It takes.... faith... to believe that we NOW (finally, today) perfectly understand, based on observation, analysis, and trial and error. If I'm not mistaken, that's why conclusions of science are called Theories, and not Truth. Scientific Theory allows that some day newly observable phenomena may disprove the Theory, and wholly change our understanding of a matter. Anyone who clings to the old ideas will then be a regarded as a fool, even if you yourself were one of them at one time.

Conclusions based on 1% educated guessing are still educated guessing (uncertain).

Reason tells us that popular opinion has nothing to do with reality. But this knife cuts both ways. Popular acceptance of the Theory of Evolution among skeptics doesn't make it any more reality than popular acceptance of Bible account of Creationism amongst the religious.

How many "gurus" does it take to reverse the public opinion on Vista? Their money might be better spent trying to convince the family-computer-experts, developers, and IT personnel who warned about Vista in the first place. I told everyone who looked to me for such decisions to hold off on Vista, based on my research and discussions with experts I trusted.

I don't know if MS can hire enough "gurus" to counteract all the bad word-of-mouth.

I think a free 60-day trial would be a lot cheaper and ultimately more effective. I know I'd download it and try it out, even though I've been a Linux user for years.