Let's call it like it is: 10.9 needs some fixing. Plugging in an external monitor shouldn't be a big thing. I shouldn't have to tread on egg shells as far as what I do with such an expensive piece of equipment.
I actually lag 4-6 months behind releases now on both my macbook and my iphone. While I used to love being an early adopter and downloading the latest release the night it came out. Over the past few years I've had so many stability issues that I can't afford the annoyance, frustrations, and hit to productivity. It definitely seems that the quality of apple os's out of the gate have more problems then they did in the past.
Anecdotal information is not particularly helpful but I have had almost zero 10.9.x kernel panic problems on any of our 11 machines except for one that had bad RAM and another that the hard drive was dying.
Is there virtualization software that is not unstable on OS X?
Some of the only kernel panics I have ever had we I think to do with VirtualBox's kernel module. VMWare feels faster too.