I've been using App Ops for a few months now on a rooted phone and I've turned off a good deal of permissions for various apps. I haven't had any force crashes from that so far. I expected it to be a bigger problem than it is.
That's good to hear, but how representative of a sample are your apps? I think more tech-oriented people gravitate towards well-coded apps that deal with exceptions well. There's lots of poorly-coded apps that don't.
You may certainly be right on that front. I have no idea how well-coded most of the apps are, but my most heavily-used apps tend to be stable ones just by virtue of the fact that when apps become unstable, I find replacements. My guess is that many people have the same workflow. That said, I don't use any social networks, I don't play very many games on my phone, and I don't have any children, so I don't have any of these apps where you interact with a cartoon cat, or that show you arbitrary colors and play noise or otherwise distracts children, so there are certainly large subsets of the app ecosystem that I really am not taking advantage of.
