That's because you're probably looking at things purely from a technical/operational perspective (i.e. can they register my ___domain easily), whereas the parent commenter is taking into account more general reports about the way GoDaddy does business.
Just because a company is technically competent doesn't mean people want to do business with them.
any advice for an alternative registrar with free DNS hosting? Preferably one with native IPv6 reachable DNS servers (which is not the case at godaddy)
Gandi http://www.gandi.net/ has a pretty good reputation, with free DNS hosting. No IPv6 reachable nameservers, however. If you want IPv6 reachable DNS servers, Hurricane Electric offers free DNS hosting https://dns.he.net/; they are a big supporter of IPv6 and so offer a variety of free services to help get it off the ground.
thanks, I'll give Gandi a try with my next ___domain. I am using some free services from Hurricane Electric, particularly an IPv6 tunnel and also a dynamic DNS after dyndns.com pissed me off.
for production domains, I would still prefer a DNS hosting that is somehow paid for (with godaddy it was included in the registration price).
They were. I've dealt with them on one occasion (had one client insist on using them as a host/registrar), and they are technically incompetent. We've had numerous outages with this client's site, and had one problem that their technical support staff were simply unable to solve after numerous phone calls (they ended up blaming it on the site, which was running on WordPress - hardly an oddity). It ended up being a very simple problem/solution, which I discovered after spending an hour or so researching it.
