I was a Dish customer almost from the beginning, and for many years, before finally switching to DirecTV because I just couldn't put up with Dish's buggy receivers any longer. In those old DirecTIVO days before the HR21 series, it was painfully obvious right here on this site that the Dish forums were full of threads about misbehaving receivers while there was almost NONE of that in the DirecTV forums. I switched just in time to avoid the HR21s and watched the DirecTV forums explode with "receiver problems" threads that continue to this day. So I count myself very lucky.
I'm still using those essentially bug-free DirectTIVO SD units while dreading having to get new receivers for HDTV. And I'm a heavy user, too, asking the receivers to do lots of things; so it's not like they simply appear bug-free because the features don't get exercised.
The last straw in my switchover decision was watching the Dish 921 thread for *two years* waiting for the unit to become solid enough to be worthwhile. It never happened, but in the meantime it was loads of fun, as a longtime software developer, bashing the laughably incompetent programming team. The errors in their software development practices were painfully obvious as you watched bugs get fixed only to return in later releases and the utterly trivial things they were unable to code correctly, like detection of 3 overlapping recording requests on a two-tuner machine. It was obvious that Dish was never going to be capable of turning out reasonably bug-free systems without sweeping changes.
I can confirm that Dish sent refurbished receivers. In fact, I once had a Dish receiver upgrade for which they insisted on sending out a technician rather than simply sending me the receiver, and he couldn't get the new receiver to accept the subscription and begin displaying TV programs. He called Dish, who promptly offered to send me a refurb unit as a replacement for the brand-new unit that had never actually been used! I nixed that, so the tech gave up and went away. After fooling with the receiver myself for a few minutes, I got it to come up and it worked fine.
I understand that sending refurbs as replacements is a fact of life in this industry. I just wish that "refurb" meant more than "put it in a brand-new shipping box".
My take on this, though, is that they have a business model of shipping a replacement receiver as a cover for their software problems; that way, you're doing something immediate for a dissatisfied customer. As a consequence, they get back a whole host of returned receivers that are, in fact, perfectly functional from a hardware standpoint. Knowing this, if you're a harried refurb tech trying to turn around units, it is no doubt a great temptation to simply declare "no problem found" and put it on the rack to be sent to the next hapless customer. And that's probably *particularly* true of a unit you don't even wanna *touch*, like the cat-pee unit. :lol:
In computer land, things are a bit different, since it's much easier to acknowledge software problems and admit that there's probably nothing wrong with the actual hardware. My (admittedly limited) experience with refurb computer products is that "refurb" generally means "the tech couldn't fix it, the storage rack is full, and the recycle truck isn't coming until next week -- there's only one other way to get it out of here". :nono: