In my experience, people who've had exorbitant numbers of kernel panics on Macs have had tons of things installed that muck around with MacOS X internals. VirtualBox, old SIMBL hacks, manual fan controls, etc. Those are all notoriously unstable and can cause lots of kernel panics.
It seems more like a buggy OS that doesn't handle certain combinations of external monitors and GPUs.
Let's call it like it is: 10.9 needs some fixing. Plugging in an external monitor shouldn't be a big thing. I shouldn't have to tread on egg shells as far as what I do with such an expensive piece of equipment.
I actually lag 4-6 months behind releases now on both my macbook and my iphone. While I used to love being an early adopter and downloading the latest release the night it came out. Over the past few years I've had so many stability issues that I can't afford the annoyance, frustrations, and hit to productivity. It definitely seems that the quality of apple os's out of the gate have more problems then they did in the past.
It may not be a process & quality question, but simply staffing with very highly experienced and smart people. Some analyze that the Windows kernel has that problem[1].
Usually when I start getting a ton of kernel panics, I suspect hardware - bad memory or hard drive. Just had an iMac doing that last month and it was indeed the hard drive.
Anecdotal information is not particularly helpful but I have had almost zero 10.9.x kernel panic problems on any of our 11 machines except for one that had bad RAM and another that the hard drive was dying.
I've only had one kernel panic clearly linked to Parallels, but I still haven't made it to a month of uptime after over two years of using OS X, so it's quite possible that's it's causing non-obvious problems even with no VMs running.
