My biggest disappointment with DTV is their equipment. If is by far the worst of any provider I have ever used. Constant freezing and a horribly designed remote and interface. Not to mention the dreaded rain fade that happens a lot more than advertised. Sure when it works they have a great picture. The problem is it's just not reliable enough. The main reason I dropped Comcast 3 years ago was because they cut out YES. Now that that is back I'm really considering moving back in the spring when I reopen the summer home.
You sound like you work for a cable co...
I can't speak for the new "Genie" $h!t I'll never get but my H24's have been wonderful and are light years ahead of the cable co's GUI's on their STB's. I'm hoping the HR24 I should be getting will be just as reliable.
Cable around my area has a lot of outages, every time a drunk wrecks a pole the whole system is down for many hours. After hurricane Ike cable was down for 3 weeks, DirecTV worked as soon as we fired up the generator.
Rain-fade may be a thing of the past in the future as soon as their engineers realize they can easily eliminate it for internet connected receivers by using the DirecTVNow online feeds as a backup.