If you take your own argument seriously, you don't need any journaled file system -- after all, the only reason to use journaling is to get better behaviour after a crash.
That said, yes, I had many kernel crashes at the start of this year, using SUSE and no proprietary modules. It took a long time to identify the piece of hardware that caused it. (It was the video card.) I have another system where usage of ionice causes hard lockups of the whole system, reproducable. E.g., running updatedb with ionice. I have never identified the culprit here and finally put it in the closet; my time was worth more than the price of a new system.