So while tinkering around with my Raspberry Pi over the past few weeks I've come to the conclusion that the storage is not stable or "production-ready" at all. While I'm usually very careful to power down the unit with the "shutdown" command, there are occasions where I lose network connectivity or power by accident. It seems that half the time this happens, the SD card gets completely hosed and I have to start all over from scratch.
Most of the other Linux systems I've worked with in the past were not this sensitive to an abrupt shutdown; they usually simply power back on, run fsck, and keep on trucking. Why is the Pi so sensitive to powerdowns? Is there any way to increase the stability of the device? I can't guarantee that it's always going to get a clean shutdown "in the field" so to speak, so it's not much use to me if I can't guarantee it will work, even when not powered down from the command line.