Budgets, Reports, and 2.3.x Stability?

[Jeff Kletsky]

First off, thanks to all the great work that has gotten GNUCash to where 
it is. There was a lot of screaming over the last few weeks, most of 
which was directed at a certain Windows-only "accounting" program that 
seems to still have vestiges of Win98 or even Win95 floating around 
inside of it, and the delightfully non-robust "piles of money" method. A 
reasonably successful transition to GNUCash 2.2.9 on Ubuntu 9.10 quickly 
followed, including, I have to admit, a few changes to the Accounts 
screen (providing column types that roll-up subaccounts).

Next on the "have to have" list --  Budget and Reporting...

I notice that (thankfully) the report structure seems to have 
drastically changed in 2.3.x. A quick attempt at "installing" the new 
budget report (budget.scm) into 2.2.9 failed, not unexpectedly. I also 
see that the rendering engine can be set for webkit in 2.3.8, which, I 
am guessing, will resolve the 2.2.9 behavior I am seeing that the style 
sheets are seemingly ignored (could be pilot error though -- any advice 
for 2.2.9 here would be welcome) and that the readability of the reports 
is effectively frozen in time in the pre-CSS era.

Given that it is my understanding that 2.4 is a few months out, it 
doesn't make a lot of sense to start dealing with report customization 
when the "base" reports and rendering system is about to change.

So, it comes down to "How 'unstable' is 2.3.8 thought to be?"

I'm aware of some issues with editing budgets in a recent trunk build 
(app crashes if I click in the budget screen -- will track down later). 
Past that, if I stick with the XML backend until a 2.4 release, are 
there any significant data-loss or basic functionality issues that would 
advise against its use at this time in a non-commercial situation? For 
example, losing the evening's work of a dozen or so transactions 
wouldn't be a huge issue, however, mysteriously losing data from a month 
ago would be...

Thanks!

Jeff