No argument here with your points about Amazon, but on the other hand their Fire stuff just works and I don't have to give a single thought to it, so I just live with the other aspects.
Last year Roku had an update that borked a lot of things and pretty much made it unusable for many. The support threads I read actually got shut down because the things broken were so numerous. Went searching because people were so quick to whine about how bad tivo sucked, Yada Yada Yada. There isn't one company and one device that's hasn't had issues at launch (this is still a new product) or released a bad update that screed things up to a decent degree, even as a mature device. Heck, Apple crippled phones with old batteries, Samsung designed a toasty Note and has broken things in firmware updates quite a few times. No mfg is immune from screw ups and mishaps.
Actually just signed up to beta test the TS4k, so hopefully will be able to head off at the pass any future issues that could affect Channels users.
I did too before the last update came out and was never given anything to test. Hopefully you have better luck with that.
I think the issue with Tivo and this device is the time that it is taking them to fix things, and the random things they are fixing. While the TS4K is a new device the platform is not, and I don't even think the SOC they are using is new. The stuff that was broken like remote functionality is stuff they've done for years.
In the examples you gave, Samsung paid dearly for the "toasty" Note. And they came back with another product that hit it out of the park. I bought a Note 8 right after launch and it was amazing... and essentially still is. Apple is Apple. They screw something up every once in a while, but they also are pretty quick usually to get things fixed when we are talking about bugs. The battery thing was as designed. And they also eventually paid dearly for it.
I still can't figure how Tivo is going to make money with the TS4K to justify them fixing and maintaining this device. They are all about subscription fees, or large upfront investments. This is neither, and also not a proprietary platform. If you are going to release a device that is the same platform that many competitors are using, the bar is a little higher that basic functions will work out of the box, like the remote for example.
I believe the same way everyone else makes money, data mining. Plus they make money licensing out their software. Apparently cable companies are using this for their next Gen boxes and tivo will be driving them behind the scenes with an AndroidTV based box.
Their DVR side was never the big money maker, and I'm assuming why they seemed to have no interest giving us loyal dvr users a box that truly married the dvr and streaming.
We'll see about the beta thing. I just filled out the info yesterday. Will keep bugging tivopm on Reddit.
tivopm is the one that invited me to beta test. No one knows if this person is really any official Tivo voice. For example, he's the one that said the lock out of developer mode was an accident, and everyone believes it. We will see, but hard to imagine Tivo would be OK with this informal online persona is communicating such an embarassing issue.
Do you expect differently from tivo? I always consider us consumers to be an afterthought to them. If he is an official rep for them, I'm sure he just got tossed into it and is doing what he can.
And I also think the developer mode could've been intentional, and they just replied the way they did because they didn't expect the venom they received. Who knows. It's always a crap shoot with them.
And your screen name reminds me of the old forum site pdaphonehome. That's was about 12+ years ago.
Small world... I was the creator of that site! Good times.
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Wish I had thought to look for this before I spent a day trying to figure out how I broke my TS4K so it couldn't play OTA channels suddenly...lol
And now today I try to go to developer mode AND I can't remember setting a darn pin...2 hours later after trying all kinds of pin numbers and factory resets I find reddit and this post and realize maybe I ain't as forgetful as I thought I was becoming...And still I can't make the darn things wifi work with my centurylink router for some reason...just connects/disconnects over and over. Everything else connects great...no issues...and when I take the TS4K to another house it connects fine...oh well...that's why I got a ethernet adaptor I guess. 
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