you should never, ever run programs that don't NEED it as root... if only for security reasons.
as for being stable, 1.7 will "soon" be marked stable and renamed to 1.8. at that time 1.6 will become depricated.
If stability is the only reason you were still using 1.6, i would consider using 1.7 .. most people run it these days and it s considered stable enough for use on production networks.