Agreed about POP Shop being slow. I recently learned that they were working on its replacement: "COSMIC store" (written in Rust + Iced), and it's super-fast. You can try it with `sudo apt install cosmic-store`.
For me it's been super stable.
I've hardly seen any bugs. And in those remote cases, it would be more correct to call them quirks than bugs, which have later been fixed anyway.
I've been using for intensive gaming, AI projects, and audio production. And when I say audio production I don't say Audacity. I say recent versions of Ableton Live running on ASIO drivers with windows VSTs and Max 4 Live instruments at 5 ms latency, all of this running through Wine with an amazing Wine managing software called Bottle (hehe).
As for gaming,, it's not hard to see people claming they get even more fps than they get with windows.
It's not a PopOS thing, it's the Linux ecosystem that is finally getting mature enough to pull this out (this time for real).
On top of this, System74, the company behind PopOS who is selling laptops with that OS, are also optimizing the kernel to make sure everything runs super smoothly...
I really don't see where your "buggy as hell" is coming from.
I actually really like my current customized KDE desktop. I have it all setup with transparency everywhere and a fully animated shader desktop wallpaper. Basically the opposite of everything Gnome stands for. :D
Everything is kinda a dumpster fire, but they nailed steam games.