Okay my Original Post might have sounded like a blame-post which it was not intended to be. So sorry about that, but my questions remain open and I would appreciate answers especially to question 2 since that has been the stable build for me and I would like to continue playing until issues might be fixed with a further patch.

Another suggestion comes to my mind that might help to increase customer trust:
What about a pinned post in technical forum where officials shortly list (and maintain) bugs that have been reported and verified by customer support. Additionally for each bug a short note about the planned patch / release where this bug will be fixed could be included.

Since Release Planning is a common technique in software development I am convinced Ironclad/Stardock has such plans anyway and the community would surely appreciate to be informed (at least to a certain extent) about the ongoing development plans.

Thanks, I suspected that kind of answer. Downloading the standalone patch 1.03 is not the problem but since I downloaded the game using StardockCentral and did not archive the game on patch level 1.03 (since doing that would mean that I actually expected the next patch to be worse) it seems that I have to stick with not playing Sins until next patch.

I am not playing online anyway so it would not make a difference for me playing 1.03. I would even play 1.0 if possible but installing the game from StardockCentral always directly leads to 1.04.

That may sound odd but I have worked through all the Troubleshooting guides available on these forums and since nothing worked I am convinced that my problem is not a configuration issue but a game issue. Thus the customer support won't be able to help me anyway except a statement like "We'll try to search and fix it".

But you are right, I should at least take my chances   
So I will reinstall the game, collect a few minidumps and send them to Ironclad.

Actually I don't believe that, even more I know that in most cases this is not true. Unfortunately software tends to behave differently on different systems and for support teams it is practically impossible to look at a log file and some system specs and tell "I see, this combination of CPU, graphics driver and OS update version may cause the issue" because the number of combinations (hardware and software) is almost endless.

But nevertheless, no need to argue, you are right to at least give them the chance to tell me what's wrong.

When will they ever fix it? i bet on ummmm 3 months