[Milhouse]

Are all these endless builds to obtain stability and reliability for Kodi 18 on Pi??

These builds serve a number of purposes, they're testing bleeding edge LibreELEC and Kodi 18 changes, they also come in handy when regression testing and bisecting bugs.

Is there still a lot of fiddly and small issues with Kodi for the platform because it's so underpowered?

No, I also do these builds for x86_64. Most if not all the performance issues have been solved on RPi3 (those that are worth/capable of being solved, anyway).

I'm hoping to just install 9.0.1 official and find it fairly smooth operating, does that sound about right?

Yes, 9.0.1 should be working well.