Which is Worse, Barbarism or Stasis?

When one reads about the fall of the Roman Empire, there tends to be two views about how this effected the development of Europe: That a) it positively effected Europe's development, because Rome's security lead to little technological and scientific advancement, or b) that it destroyed Roman cultural learning in the West, which took the Renaissance to resolve.

So I have a simple question: Which do you lean towards, and why?
 
The truth lies between these two schools of thought. The assumption that the Renaissance conclusively set Europe on the path to world domination ( ;) ) isn't all true - given that the Black Death only sped up things, whilst the Roman state apparatus sped up the infrastructure development of most of Europe.
 
As Savoytruffle said it's not an either-or thing. In particular the Carolingians tend to be entirely neglected in most analyses of Europe's tendencies to unitary states, and it's significant for the Jared Diamond thesis that Europe's revivals in learning, technology, and overall global strength began with that attempt to unite it and create an extra-territorial culture that could do things like spur continual contact in trade and a continental scholar-class (this is where the ideas of certain AH people that simple territorial expansion in and of itself for aesthetic maps produces growth is flawed. The prettiness of maps and size of empires has nothing at all to do with it).
 
Stasis never actually happens, and Rome had changed and was changing plenty before the Germanic warbands who had long made up much of its military started to actually take over. 'Barbarism' was a result of the Roman imperial state falling apart partly under its own weight.
 
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