A lot of the comments are asserting outright fraud, which certainly exists in the review community, but my problem has always been that the reviewers don't know

A lot of the comments are asserting outright fraud, which certainly exists in the review community, but my problem has always been that the reviewers don't know what they're reviewing. Many years ago, I wanted to get a 3D printer, and someone said "just get what Wirecutter tells you to get". I did that and had my printer the next day. It was TERRIBLE. It didn't take g-code as input, you had to put your model into their slicer, which required registering with their company. (I'll let you guess what language the Terms of Service I agreed to were in.) Their custom software was slow and buggy. The printer itself is designed in a way that the bed can never be level, and so their software requires you to manually level the bed with a piece of paper EVERY SINGLE TIME IT CAN'T SAVE IT OR LET YOU TYPE IT IN YOURSELF, and then it prints a raft that is level, then it prints your thing on top of the raft. Print a 1mm by 1mm cube? 120mm x 120mm raft. Just awful. Did I mention that it's literally incapable of printing PLA or PETG, and just barely eeks out an ABS print before the nozzle clogs because of a horrifyingly bad heatbreak design? I put it in the box that night and resigned myself to doing my own research. (I ended up with a Prusa i3, which has served me nobly for many years without any problems at all. No, we didn't have Vorons or X1 Carbons back then.) And no, I didn't know what PLA, PETG, ABS, heat creep or clogs were when I got that printer. That's the years of experience I've accumulated coming into play, explaining why that printer should have never been recommended to anyone for any reason. To be a reviewer, you have to know about that stuff, or you're just misleading people. That's where the Wirecutter failed. They made a cube in the included software. A cube-like thing popped out an hour later. "It's perfect and so easy!" they proclaim. That's not a review, that's "well it didn't blow up the first time I turned it on". Better than nothing but a colossal waste of my time. That was the first and last thing I bought on Wirecutter's recommendation. (As an aside, I returned the printer but UPS never showed up to pick up the package, so I started at it sadly for many years. One day I decided to rebuild it with an open-source mainboard and a Hemera hotend. Worked muuuuuuuuch better after that. In fact, I love the little thing. So really, it was just cost-cutting on the hotend and "we're going to make our own software instead of just adding our logo to Slic3r" that killed it. Though honestly, the bed design is quite terrible and I haven't been able to fix it. I added auto-leveling, though, so it's bearable to use.) Making my long comment even longer, I have to say I kind of like Consumer Reports. I bought a subscription a while ago and it was good for building out my new apartment (with working kitchen, a first for me in a decade). I specifically liked that I really wanted to buy a stand mixer, but they basically say they're all bad. KitchenAid apparently replaced all the metal parts with plastic ones, and so while your Mom's Kitchenaid mixer is great, the one you buy on Amazon today is going to break in 2 years. Consumer reports basically said that, and I did a crazy thing in this day and age: I went without! Someday someone will make one that's not a piece of junk, and I'll buy it.