My main problem with Dish has been customer service.
Sadly, that's my main gripe with Dish. And DirecTV. And Comcast. And Qwest.
It's surprising that none of these companies have thought to compete by offering excellent service. If any one of those companies did, they'd own the market.
My first Dish installation was negligent
When I had DirectTV, the first installers wanted to screw it in to my roof above my kitchen. I told them I didn't want holes in my roof above my kitchen. They walked away.
The next crew came out and said it was way too icy and wouldn't install anything. They walked away.
Finally got a 3rd crew out who installed it right on the side of my house in about a half hour. FINALLY!
With Dish, they came out on a Saturday. First guy spend 6 hours before saying he was missing a part and would be back in an hour. 3 hours later I have to call back to find out that "Oh, he went home sick". They send out another person who decided that the dish is on the wrong side of the house, so then starts mounting another dish on the other side. He gets stuck so has to call in a 3rd person. Finally, 16 hours later, the dish is installed.
Alas, as you can see, both companies kind of sucked in my experience.
I eventually dumped DirectTV after we noticed out bill increasing every month. Signed the 2 year contract with Dish only to see that 3 months into it, our bill started increasing.
Again, no discernible difference between the companies in that regard, either. ;o)
When I was shopping again this last round, I'd call both Dish and DirecTV. In addition to the hard-sale tactics, my gripe was that you really had to ask a lot of questions to fully understand what you'd end up paying for. Neither company is very straightforward or opaque in the pricing on their advertising literature.
In the end, you can really only compare the companies based on their differences, and there aren't that many. It comes down to programming packages and hardware features.