My gimp has become a real pain. It's always crashing, unless I save my work every 5 minutes I lose it. I was doodling last night and ended up making something really nice and crash, gone. It also takes forever to start, but I attribute that to the quadrillion brushes, patterns, and, scripts I have.
I'm thinking about finding a list of all of the scripts that come with gimp and deleting all the others except gmic and mathmap and starting again, just re-adding the scripts I need. This is becoming a pain.

It might be worth trying out the GURM brush and pattern manager to see if it will help with the time it takes Gimp to start up. It usually fires up for me in about 20 or so seconds. I haven't got that many brushes but the ones that I do use I can install after Gimp has started.

Short version:
I suggest quality over quantity

Long version:
Like every app based on plugins and external files (if you use Firefox you'll know what I mean;)) adding more and more stuffs sounds cool at the beginning but in the long term it's best for you and your app if you kill the clutter and focus on what is needed and what's not, for instance if you have too many brushes you end up being lost among them and not knowing anymore which one fits your needs (more choices sometimes implies less choices). And, logically, it increases your boot time.

Now, does quantity affects stability (crashes) ?
I have no idea.

I tried gurm and just didn't like it. I don't have THAT many brushes etc. I load and unload them as needed. I think the problem is that when I was new to gimp I grabbed every script I saw mentioned. Now I have tons of them and I don't use the majority of them. I need to go weed out the useless ones.

I think part of my crashes have been because I've been working with some really big images (4608 x 3456 at 300 dpi), that gives my old laptop a headache.