Like anything, patches are a double-edged sword that can be good when used wisely and very very bad when used poorly. Back in the early 90s, patching was done a lot for PC games released as shareware, largely because shareware survived not only on how fun it was, but also on how stable it was. The most famous example of intelligent patch use would have to be DooM, which went through roughly 12 revisions before they stopped updating its core with fixes and tweaks. Even with all of the patches the game received, DooM 1.0 is pretty stable and reliable (though not as capable as the 1.9 engine that they ended up with by the time the engine was retired).
The darker side of patching can be seen in games where the retail product cannot even run until it's been patched, though that's not too common. I think the most notorious example of poor patch use is a tie between Sims and Sims 2. Every single expansion pack for each of these games introduced a slew of new bugs, and you practically had to wait for 2 months for the developers to release a patch to fix these issues before you could even use them. It got so bad that EA was actually stealing user-made patches for Sims 2 expansions instead of coding the fixes themselves (without giving any credit to the actual patch creators, naturally; that pissed off a lot of the online Sims 2 community).
The best rule of thumb is this: make your product as though you can never patch it after it's on the market. Once it reaches the market, only patch when absolutely necessary, fixing as many issues at once as you can. This is how shareware developers used to do it, and this is how some companies still do it.
Sky Render - Sanity is for the weak.
