and found it much more stable than the 9x track
Because it was NT, a modern, preemptive, true multitasking kernel, and running in protected mode throughout the whole thing instead of trying to hack DOS to make it multitasking, something it was never made to do. I don't know why they went with that for home users for so long and made them deal with all that instability when they had a proper OS that the corporate world was already using. Bluescreen jokes were a staple of the 90s because of this. This era is mainly where the whole meme of Windows being an unstable piece of garbage came from.
Business users got to use NT almost ten years before regular consumers got a hold of it.