Constantine, Re: "how is my credibility?"
How do you think your credibility is? Is it important to you? Dan3 clearly has no regards for his own credibility, but you strike me as different. Based on that, I would agree that your claims hold more worth than Dan's.
Regarding Athlon stability, I have argued in the past that it's the platform, not the processor, which determines how stable a system is. I have heard many reports in the past, as well as continuing reports about stability issues with 3rd party chipsets. Since AMD relies heavily on chipsets from VIA and others, much of the stability equation is out of their hands.
Chipsets like the nForce and KTxxx chipsets have problems when you populate the DIMM slots with different memory technologies. Unless you have specially certified memory modules, you may not even get full performance when more than one slot is populated. VIA has also been prone to I/O related bugs in the past. These issues and others give the perception of faulty system performance, even though AMD is not directly involved.
But whether you blame AMD or not, it affects the way the end-users regard the brand. If the guy from Emulators.com had bad experiences, which I believe hold a grain of truth, then he has essentially made an impression on a number of his readers, and that may affect their buying decision for the future.
There is a lot of benefit to building a system whose components are mostly from the same manufacturer. Those who have Intel CPUs, chipsets, motherboards, ethernet, graphics, and sound are less likely to have issues. Of course, that definitely doesn't fill the major demand in the market, but I think more distributors are trending towards this model. Intel already has 60% of the chipset market (which translates to >75% of the Intel based chipset market). Many see value in sticking to the same manufacturer. The future might even hold a greater attach rate for other Intel parts in Intel systems.
AMD, as usual, has an uphill battle. Given the current state of the market, I'm even less convinced that Hammer will be a hit, simply because performance is less of a selling feature in PCs. AMD's greatest chance lies in servers, and their ability to offer low cost solutions in a market that has previously enjoyed very high margins.
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