It's hard to understand when you have such a great design as I believe the 625 is, Dish changed the features and made their product less competitive compared to their competitors(mainly DirecTV).Here's my own opinion how I rate features on the ViPs:

1.You can record what? 3 or 4 programs at once?.Rating: Excellent.

2.Dish's ability to be able to run 1 cable into the home and support 2 TVs,that's how they did my 625 setup?(because the switch is in the LNB).Rating: Excellent.

3. To be able to choose Single or Dual Mode.In Single Mode you can swap tuners,have PIP/SplitScreen(see what's on which tuner).
In Dual Mode provide true MRV(with RG6 coax) to the second TV(be able to view recordings or select programs to watch from the channel guide) using the second tuner.
Rating: Excellent.

4. Have the ability to only pause for 1 hour and have 2-60 minute live buffers(or maybe more in OTA?).
Rating: Poor(should have at least 2 -90 minute buffers(no timeout feature),(2-120 minute buffers would be the best).

And I know there are ethernet features(which can put more icing on the cake,or problems).

And that is how I see things and I am sure people will chastise my opinions but these items are how I see the best and the worse so far from Dishnetwork.So.........Flame on!?.

I was almost ready to switch to D*, but their DVR's are several notches below E*'s. So, I wholly disagree with your blanket statement.

I'd vote for longer than 60 minutes. Far too many times I pause at the start of a show, get way distracted with other things (for an hour) and end up missing the first few minutes of a one hour show as the buffer starts moving the show forward. TWC had 90 minutes (or two hours), and it worked well for me (although that was about that only thing I really liked about their DVR compared to E*'s). (and yes, I know how to record things...)

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I can see someone getting distracted for an hour a couple times, but "too many"? Oh well. In an ideal world, sure I'd like longer live buffers. But, what if it comes at the expense of hard drive time/space? I personally would rather have more space for recording.