While the primary reason for pothole formation remained the freezing and thawing of rainwater over wet winters, and the heaviest vehicles, such as lorries, were likely to cause immediate damage, the growing weight of cars was worsening road surfaces.
Not sure if irregular booting is still an issue, but that sounds a lot like device names changing between boots. If I could hazard a guess - you've got something like /dev/sda in your fstab, where ideally you'd have UUID=1234-ABC. You can get the uuid by running
Usually? Come on, get real.