[CrashCore]

I can attest to your experiences: WM 6.5 is definitely not as stable as 6.1, and I also experienced the degradation of reliability as the ROM ages like you mentioned. But it has features way too nice to go back to 6.1, at least for me. The lock screen and titanium home is just too cool. The start menu has its ups and downs, but I'm swaying from the topic.

I've been using the bare bones builds from mattsm's thread in this (HTC Titan Upgrades) forum (I'm on Verizon and additionally like my ROM's to have just what I want in them, no more or less) until 23017, but now he seems to only have links to the Sprint builds of 23037 and 23041, so I might just try 23041 anyways. They're usually pretty nice after I apply my customizations.

My biggest problem has always been the stability of the messaging program, although this has plagued me since 6.1 on my Apache, so I guess it's just a custom ROM thing. It's definitely worse in 6.5 builds, but because of the reasons I mentioned above, I live with it.