obviously, NTFS was an attempt not at creating a more stable file system than fat/fat32, but at excluding any other systems from accessing the filesystem.
VFAT is too easy for linux to use, so NTFS addresses the issue by being exclusionist for anything except winnt (since, as you say, it's a proprietary filesystem).
Of course many people will think this is a problem with linux, forgetting conveniently that not only can their windows installation not use their ext2 and ext3 partitions, it can't even see them!