Sorry to hear you've had a bad experience - did you try the latest HEAD code?
To be clear: 2.9B was not a "beta" release. It was the second "labs" release - i.e. not suitable for production environments. We will be releasing v2.9 Community in "final" form in the near future, but I don't have a date to give you.
If you're attempting to deploy Alfresco in a stable production system, you should really consider the Enterprise versions. These have been certified on a number of software stacks and also come with dedicated support channels.
If you're going live in a couple of months, and want to stick with Community, I'd go with v2.1 - unless there's a compelling reason why you need any of: Multi Tenancy, Project Collaboration Spaces, or enhanced WCM deployment introduced in v2.9.
Thanks,
Mike