Apple forcing change to Mountain Lion by producing poor updates for other OS versions?

Question

I've been holding off on 10.7.5 and I don't want to go to Mountain Lion. I wonder if Apple really cares about supporting the older OS versions by producing updates that don't result in all the apparent problems people are facing with the 10.7.5 update for example. Not even considering the issues that many seem to be having with ML upgrades.

Answer 1

It's important to remember that these forums are for people with problems, and as such, They are not accurate indicators of real world issues.
Millions of people are using Lion and Mountain Lion with no issues, they won't be using these forums.
Personally, I've used and installed Lion and Mountain Lion on three different Macs in my household, MacMini 3.1, MacBook Pro 3.1, and a MacBook Air 1.1 (limited to Lion), and have had no serious problems with them.
The best course of action is to always have a backup of your current partition before upgrading to Lion or Mountain Lion. In fact, you should have a backup even if you're not planning on upgrading.
Personally, I use Carbon Copy Cloner and SuperDuper for backup purposes on lieu of Time Machine. I like the advantage of having a cloned, bootable partition.
Also, IMHO, Mountain Lion is an improvement over Lion. It smoothed out the rough edges of Lion.
Lion is no longer available from the App Store unless you phone Apple at 1-800-My-Apple to get an autorization code. But, since you don't need Lion to upgrade to Mountain Lion, I'd recommend skipping Lion, if you can.