Just to throw out my 2 cents. I agree that you have to define what traits you are aiming to stabilize. I think if Ed was aiming for consistent heat levels, it would have been smart to define that up front, because to most of us, stability means pod size, shape, texture, and heat. That might have saved him all of this headache.
I would consider 90% uniform pods stable, but then you have to define uniformity. You could be really strict and say the pods must be within 1% variance in size, or heat or you could say 20% is acceptable. Color, shape and texture are a little more obvious, but even harder to define quantitatively.
Using TS Butch T as an example (since it's stability was called into question as well) , last year I took semi-random samplings of 100 pods throughout the year and I think over the course of the year I had an average of 83% that fit MY definition of what Butch T's should look like. I consider that relatively stable. Given another observer, they might only classify 40% of them as Butch T's, because it is all very subjective. From what I have seen so far this year, my first round of Butch T's will be NOWHERE near 83%, it is looking more like 40%, but they haven't been harvested yet. All the seed came from either isolation, or were left over from the original seeds that I purchased from Neil. They are in a different spot this year, and the weather is the complete opposite of last year, so maybe it is just environment conditions, hard to say.
TL
R -- Criteria for stability must be defined before you can accurately measure stability.