I switched from Dish last summer to DirecTV & just like you have noticed between your Dish PQ & your parents Directv PQ, directv pq blows Dish away. I'm a bit of a videophile so I may notice more than the average viewer. I've also noticed that the difference in pq is also more significant on the better TV's in my house, which are all over 50" Samsung & Panasonic plasmas, except one 32" Vizio LED.
Overall I think my Directv experience has been better than with Dish but I do miss some of the Hopper features, but those are just minor. The major feature of Dish I missed I made up by getting a "Sling" type box.
Btw, my main reason for leaving Dish (at least the straw that broke the camel's back) was technical problems with my original Hopper and Dish's insistence for me to pay $200 for the upgrade while they were upgrading others for free. I was willing to up for 2 more years on my contract but felt insulted by the lack of a reason why colleagues got free upgrades & they insisted on me paying. Of course the day I canceled they offered me the free upgrade & other goodies to stay but I already got Direct installed & saw that beautiful picture. ... no more hazy picture like the beginnings of eye sight depreciation. Haven't looked back since.
I'm glad I read this post. I too am a videophile. Every 4-5 yrs I upgrade my gear. I now have a Sharp Elite PRO-70X5. The bigger the screen the more it shows a bad signal. Garbage in garbage out. BD is the best, followed by OTA then satellite. I had D* for 10yrs and decided to give Dish a try. I should have keep D* when I switched to Dish to compare, but I didn't. My bad. Locals in HD on dish have a lot of Mosquito noise and I'm focused on it now. I don't remember D* having that issue, but I was not looking for it. The only way I'll be able to find out is to go back to D*, keep Dish and compare. D* wants me back and agreed to replace my D* dish with a new style, replace the 75 wire and provide the Genie. They said if their PQ is no better than Dish, I can terminate within 24hr at no charge, no contract. However if it's 24hr and one minute, I'm locked into 2 yrs.
Would you say that your local HD channels on D* are better than Dish?
Locals get compressed the most. I figure if D* does a better job with locals, then all the other less compressed channels "should" have better pq too.
I will take a $200 hit leaving Dish and a lot of the perks they offer as a new subscriber. So going back to D* will cost me. Videophiles like myself have a hard time justifying a better dollar deal for a lesser quality picture. And that maybe because of the equipment. Smaller tv screens typically don't show imperfections as clearly as the larger screens do. A HD tv (not 4K) 40" vs 70" screen has the same pixels. The pixels get larger as the screen does. So they show digital noise more.
My question here is how well does D* vs Dish provide a signal with their equipment. Maybe the Genie is better then the Hopper? The Hopper converts to 1080 where the Genie let's native signals pass through. Example, my local Fox does 720. The hopper converts it to 1080 and may not be doing a good job of it. Where the Genie will pass it as 720 and let my TV or processor up convert it to 1080. The Genie passes what ever the signal is. The Hopper, you must go into the menu and choose what you want. 480, 720, 1080. I like that the Genie passes the native signal. Also the question of bit rates and compression affect how each company provides the signal.