Thank you so much to everyone who took the time to respond, Your in-depth responses over a wide range of issues has served to confirm what I had suspected. There are so many good points to these machines, but there are a large number of issues that have been with these machines for years that Bernina is failing to address on a timely basis, if ever.
I wish Bernina would focus more on the actual sewing quality and reliability of their machines, and less on producing even more costly and unreliable “new” models, with even more bells and whistles.