I always work on the latest version of Factorio because from experience the experimentals are always more stable than the stable release, unless they aren't, in which case, thanks to Factorio sending automated crash reports to Wube, a patch will be released before more than a few people are even affected.
In fact I'd say it's a better idea to only release new features in experimental versions of Factorio (after all the new features count as experimental too), though I will still fix critical bugs on both stable and experimental branches.