1. If you have Dish and are losing signal due to weather you should have made a service call. I live in north central mass and rarely loose signal due to rain. Thunderheads miles a way may occasionally cause signal loss for les than 5 minutes, but I can still watch the dvr or switch to Roku. Yes I do have to clean heavy wet snow off the dish, occasionally, in the winter but it is not a big deal.
2. Cable companies tend to have a monopoly of sorts. IMHO that is why the equipment is old and outdated etc. same with infrastructure. A year ago my wife's employer set her up to work at home. They installed comcrap Internet for her. It took three visits to get it right. Even after it was "fixed" they told us we couldn't watch the unscrambled tv because it would adversely affect the internet service....ultimately her company decided to not pay for it any more, they figured most folks already have high speed Internet why should they pay for additional service. We got rid the comcrap increased our DSL service ( Verizon) and haven't had an issue in months!
3. As was stated every cable company offers different services in different areas. Even with in the same state or geographical area the channel lineup can be different. So as we say YMMV! Recently I was in Florida visiting my sister in law (oklawaha). She has bright house cable and phone, interface is horrible, guide is a separate channel, she didn't even realize that she had any hd channels because they are in a different location than the regular lineup. When I did some research to see what else was available, Brighthouse was it...even looking for phone and Internet bundles there was no other choice. Of course she could have a dish, but she still needs phone and internet so...they loose power a lot due to hurricane damage...not sure how well a dish would work with the hurricane issuedidn't, see many so I don't know if that is any indication.
4. Bottom line is if you are happy with what you have keep it. If you want to check out the other guy go for it, just remember the grass isn't always greener...we all have different tv watching habits the is no right or wrong
Ross