I have been a PC Gamer since 1988 back in the days of DOS games and I have only ever seen a handful of game this bugged on launch day. And the OP is a flat out liar to say "...Games on day 1 are ALWAYS buggy." Ever play Doom, how about Doom2, how about any PC game before even half the people in the world had access to the internet. Those game were just fine. You know why? They had to be. Developers couldn't be lazy and do a half-assed job and say sorry we'll patch it in a day or two. No they didn't have that luxury so they did it right the first time. Developers have gotten in this terrible habit of releasing broken games and the saying my bad I'll fix it only to have it take days, weeks, and occasionally months to be patched to a playable state.
I remember the headaches of getting a DOS game to work with Sound Blaster clone cards, messing about with IRQ channels and Doom wad files lol.
In earlier days game companies didn't make much cash at all from PC games, a few hundred thousand at the most so they had to get it right, because you had the Sony Playstation, Sega Saturn and Nintendo 64 taking away a lot of revenue. But games on the PC were far more in depth and interesting. But when consoles caught up with the merits of PC gaming, developers started to tap into the market, and no one can blame them.
The thing is consoles are now the main source of revenue and gone are the days when a game was structured primarily for the PC. You don't see so many flight sims any more, or highly immersive role playing games.
But I share your thoughts about games not being so broken in the past. I used to buy a game on CD and it would seem to work perfectly. A few months later I'd see a patch on a magazine cover disk and look at the fixes the patch did, but I wouldn't be familiar with any of the issues it was supposed to fix. In general it was usually mainly multiplayer fixes. However I still recall discussions of PC developers releasing games with bugs knowing that they can always patch it later, but that was also seen as an advantage of the PC, patches and updates.
But things have changed now. There are still very enjoyable games coming out and most of them are using the relatively recent PC multiplaying technologies and also because games are primed at a more simpler experience such as that of a console we just have to realise that games are going to be much less complex than what we grew up with.
Regardless of who the developer or publisher is, next time you see a game advertised with impressive narration and wondrous trailer visuals, just think to yourself: "Yea I'll believe it when I see it!" And you won't be so disappointed
Incidentally I have been playing computer games since Pong and Space Invaders lol, and although I see CoD as an old favourite that is now deceased and pushing up the daisies, I see Crysis 2 as a new and very thrilling experience, regardless of insane level graphical demands or not. It's unfortunate that problems exist on launch day, and I don't understand the lack of graphical tweaks in a menu, but I'm not going to lose sleep over it anyway