Same boat. I'm still on Sierra and still have concerns as a colleague on High Sierra almost hosed his system with APFS. Any stability issues on the new file system?
It's been mostly fine on High Sierra, but I did have one instance where my inodes went wonky. Had to restore from backups as Disk Utility couldn't do anything with it.
HFS+ was terrible, but at least I knew most of the ways in which it was terrible.
People bitch and moan about HFS+ but I've never found anything particularly objectionable about it, even after writing several filesystem utilities on top of it.
I've always found Spotlight to be utter garbage, but that's not the fault of HFS+.
OK, so you're not just spewing nonsense, but it bears repeating that the internals of HFS+ were horribly dated towards the end of its life. This prevented them from adding features or fixing bugs in a way that would be forward looking.
The system requirements for HFS and HFS+ reflected this and partially explain why there was little progress for literally years at a time.
HFS+ was terrible, but at least I knew most of the ways in which it was terrible.