I think mixture and I are very much comparing apples and oranges here.
When I posted I was very much thinking of the kind of machine a home user would have - its clear his experience is with larger scale office machines.
My dislike of Epsons is deep-seated. For several years one company I worked with was Epsons biggest UK customer, and we were for periods getting failure rates of 80% - on sales volumes in excess of 100,000 units / year. Cost us a fortune in goodwill - so much so that we gave up on them and switched to HP, despite the much higher initial purchase cost.
They're better now, but still below par.
I agree the office oriented Epson machines are more reliable, and I also accept the print quality on some models is outstanding - but the units aimed at the home consumer are utter garbage. Failure prone, and built in obselesence in the form of the ink pad counter described earlier.
As for lasers, for a home user Brothers and Samsungs are prefectly acceptable - I've examples of both lasting over five years (in fact I've not had to replace one of either brand at a customer so far). I'd certainly agree that a Xerox is going to be a better bet in a high print environment though.
As regards my comment about the HP software being bloated and unreliable - yes, that comment was very specifically aimed at their inkjets, not the lasers.