Counterpoint: this is one of the most disappointing releases I've seen.

  I hold Snow Leopard to high esteem still because it made everything faster and smoother.

Well there's the rub. Snow Leopard was largely a bug fix release. Sonoma is atrocious. It is the buggiest release I've dealt with since the pre-Tiger days. You name it, it's broken. File sharing (both SMB and AFP are broken in different ways). Dtrace. Keyboard input. The atrociously enshittified settings app. Hell iMessage stopped synchronizing with my phone while I'm on a VPN.

As long as the focus is on whiz bang bullshit I can't imagine Sequoia will be any good.