I have two top of the line pfaff machines. The embroidery machine was purchased just over five years ago and the performance 5 within the last two.
The thread snips were not seated properly on the embroidery machine and caused some grief . The dealer fixed it at a class one day. Otherwise they are very reliable and go in for cleaning every hundred hours of sewing.
I had a problem with certain brands of thread breaking a lot(when i got the embroidery machine) so I stopped buying them.There are so many beautiful threads that work perfectly that I couldn't be bothered fussing with ones that don't. The performance is happy with all of the threads that the creative likes.
I have two so I don't need a backup.
I had a real learning curve with the embroidery machine and there were days I could have tossed it out the window. Now without so many operator errors, them machine runs much better :-)
I have enjoyed having all of the great features on these machines and even though I don't use some of them often. I think it was worth paying extra to get this quality of parts and design.