Right on about the Tivo Mini. I use a Tivo for locals in Florida thereby needing just one DISH receiver with two tuners and an OTA tuner. The Mini is used in the bedroom and it works very well but your observations are spot on. Dumping the memory and not being able to access many things the TIVO has are annoying. But it is fast and has no ongoing fees after purchase. DISH did a great job with the wireless Joey. (My daughter has). Not using your Wifi system for it was an excellent way to go.
And to expand on your point, TiVo's insistance to use and only support MoCA for Mini is because a lot of people have pretty bad and poorly set-up WiFi along with old routers that heat up and even just crap out unable to handle the load.
TiVo support even has the audacity to say Mini's wont work behind a network switch. TiVo will often find fault with a Mini only because it is behind a switch and tell people to connect it directly to the router--utter not practical for vast majority of people, and
LOONEY advice--but what they really want is for your to ditch your LAN, especially WiFi, and
"USE MoCA!!!!!" they say.
As to your point of satellite setting things up, Both Dish and DirecTV have techs to go to homes and set up everything and not use the customers, usually, lousy LAN. The subnet seperates customers LAN traffic from the Hopper-Joey traffic. Also, Dish uses 5GHz for wireless Joeys; I would presume DirecTV does as well. Less crowded on that band.
One thing I would LOVE for the Mini, but I know that it aint EVER happening with Rovi slugs in charge, is if I could initiate a transfer from the Mini to its Host DVR. The way it is now, I have to go to the Host DVR itself and then go through the transfer so that I can watch it on the Mini in the preferred room--AND not I aint always in the mood to fire up my tablet and to into TiVo Online (plus it would probably be a faster process just to go to the other room in the house).
The reason I would love that is that I do have a couple of S3 TiVo's and I use them mostly as storage because the CC on those old boxes is solid back background with no options to change that. So, I often prefer to transfer recorded programs to an S4 where I have set the CC options for opaque background, and I will view it from the Mini. Having opaque background does make all the difference in the world to me. But that aint in Rovi's (not TiVo by name) crystal ball.