Various Preferences not "sticking"

Having been a long time Mac user since the 80's starting with an SE, I have to say that I've never had so many problems with various preferences not saving after a major upgrade. It began with 10.4 with the annoying Finder views not saving my meticulous sizing and placement of my icons in a given window. I had to do a "clean" install to regain that ability after upgrading from 10.4 to 10.5.
Now with 10.6, after upgrading, there are NUMEROUS preferences not holding as well as annoying bugs: 1) Finder window sizing and icon placement; 2) sound output to direct to Digital Out; 2) Startup Disk starting up with all drive's highlighted; 3) Start Disk not showing any Boot Camp/Windows partitions/drives.
Those are the major ones off the top of my head.
The only way to resolve this was to yet another completely "clean" install on a brand new drive and manually install all my applications and copy my preferences.
This is absolutely HORRIBLE having to constantly do clean installs. I used to kid my Winblows using friends whenever they had to upgrade or resinstall their OS from scratch. But now in the past several major revisions of OS X, I, too, have had to spend DAYS with a clean install.
I have better things to do with my life than spend a whole weekend and more, on top of having to buy another hard drive in order to do a clean install and copy over all the old settings from the old hard drive.
Is everyone else beginning to experience these same OS X upgrade headaches?
Am I simply to toss my entire preferences (and perhaps Application Support) folder to see if this solves various issues?
Like I said, I have better things to do with my life than wasting it troubleshooting annoying OS X bugs.

The first upgrade from 10.4 to 10.5 was on a G5 Dually 2.5. The Finder views not saving was only resolved by clean install. Perhaps it was a dysfunctional machine in some unforeseen way, but it worked just fine until the upgrade.
The next upgrade from 10.5 to 10.6 was on a brand new 2008 Mac Pro 8-core 2.8. I say brand new because I just a fresh install of 10.5 and all applications when this computer replaced the dead G5 and then I deployed for a year and with a machine I used for maybe a total of 2 light duty hours over an entire year, did an in-stride upgrade to 10.6 and immediately had these issues, well, how dysfunctional can a machine get with practically no usage and now third party utilities (previously known as system extensions in the pre-X word)?
I upgraded my MBP in-stride to 10.6 and luckily nothing bad to report so far.
Regarding your unspoken suggestions, I already took the most painful of resolutions by starting on a brand new drive and installing the OS and every single application cleanly one by one. So there is no alternative suggestion that you could have had that would have evoked as much fury as the frustration experiencing with individually installing years of collected software, and setting my work spaces the way I had it before. A whole weekend shot.
I tried deleting .DS_Store files using the Terminal, manually resizing the target window in question to my liking, then after closing and reopening, staring back at all my changes lost and a "default" view thrust upon me. No matter of setting permissions and correctly with Disk Utility worked. I've trashed various Finder and OS related plist files to no end.
And to anyone who tells me I have no right to vent, well then you sure don't know much about the good ol' bad days at the dawn of the "web" where flame wars were rampant for those who did not know how to tread the cyber highway.
Every consumer product should have some sort of Quality Assurance check to ensure that certain aspects are as trouble- and bug-free as possible. The user interface is definitely one of those areas I would put a high priority in thorough testing, especially management of custom settings and preferences.
Should I parse my text with the now passe </rant on/ off> explicit commands to help those skip passages that add nothing but blather and spittle to the discussion?
Are have we turned into a bunch of overly sensitive, stuck-up arrogant yahoo's that Windblows flame-baits portray us as?

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