I have had a love/hate relationship with my Janome and had a miserable dealer as well who blamed every problem on "operator error". There is a small oil wick hole under the bobbin case that tends to dry out making the bobbin case rattle, growl and even jump out of place. Once I found out about this, I oil it regularly when I clean my machine. I also found that this machine does not begin sewing easily without pulling fabric into the feed dog plate. The single hole plate helped as did using leaders. My 6500 also likes to veer off the seam line at seam junctions. I have worn off paint on the bed of the machine and around the edge of the machine and pins seem to scratch the finish easily. I also had a lot of trouble raising and lowering the feed dogs for FM quilting. Once the feed dogs were down they would not come back up into place no matter how you moved the toggle for that function. As a result the machine would not feed fabric through properly and the stitch length was always off. Another Janome dealer finally corrected that problem by adding a missing screw. I like the thread cutter, larger harp and fancy stitches. I do wish that this machine (and others) had a longer basting stitch. My old Singer 201 has a longer stitch length than my Janome 6500. There are no perfect machines out there. Learn your machine and make it work for you.