I am very fond of Brothers, but they have plastic gears too. Some of these posts kinda make it sound like Singer is the only brand that uses plastic gears but this is the era of planned obsolescence and they all do it. (I do think Brother is better than Singer these days, though.)
If you already have a good sewing machine, then I second the recommendation for your new machine to be embroidery-only. I have this set up and it's great because I can still be sewing while the embroidery machine is working away on its own. And if one needs to go into the shop, you still have the other to play with.
My embroidery-only machine is a Brother PE770; I bought it from Amazon. I don't use it a lot but every time I've wanted to use it, it's been ready for me. The only problems I've had have been due to either user error (wrong stabilizer, etc.) or poor materials (cheap thread that shredded). My only gripe is that the screen is really small and it's tough to tell what design you're selecting if you've got a lot of stuff on your USB stick; everything looks like blobs. As a work-around for that, I do my pattern selecting on my PC and only put the design/designs I'm about to stitch out on the stick so I don't accidentally get the wrong thing going. For my needs this is the perfect machine and I'm very happy with it.