rabbitmq used to be one of the hardest things to self-host (even at relatively small scale). But it has been pretty stable since moving to Cloudamqp as a managed solution.
I had the same experience. I had particular trouble configuring encryption for connections. It didn't help that they'd switched configuration file-formats, but the documentation and tutorials still used the old format.
Never had any stability issues though. Once it was up and running, it was solid.
