That's valid. As the Consumer's Reports article pointed out, with many brands, the uber TOL was like this GE and the beloved Maytag 902/906 series offered the consumer less choices and were less versatile than many less expensive machines.

My response was then and is now, "So what?". I thought it was presumptuous of CU to expect that their choices would reflect the wants/needs of all buyers of washing machines. People like my Mother would have been very happy with being able to push one button or one control for her washing machine.

Like most women at that time, she NEVER washed silks or woolens in the machine and, for the most part, would have used one setting 99% of the time. I don't have the numbers at my fingertips, but I would expect that for the entire United States, probably 95% of the time, or more, people used their washers the same way with the same settings for almost every washload. I don't remember ANYBODY in our household (besides me, of course) using the low speed on our Filter-Flo. Mae, our surrogate mother, was a poet of laundry and would occasionally use the short cycle on the GE if she had a quick leftover load of lightly soiled clothing. Occasionally, she would use the "Under-6" load select setting for similar reasons. But for 99% of the time in our houselhold those 4 buttons stayed on "NORMAL", "WARM" "WARM" and "LARGE  10 - 12" which was the second button setting on the TOL GE from 1958 to 1972. Ironically, my Grandmother, my Mother's mother who had practically the same V-12 Filter-Flo as we, washed EVERYTHING on the slow speed setting because she thought the normal setting was too rough. So those same 4 buttons remained on the same settings except the speed button was always turned down to "SLOW". I'm almost sure the slow setting probably matched the oscillations on her wringer machine that remained in her basement until the day she died, just in case the new-fangled automatic failed her.

The Maytag A806 and the usually 2nd from the TOL on other brands were always the machines of choice for people like me, who loved to push buttons and play around with the machines to see what they could do. Think about how many of your mothers who could drive ever used the D2, and/or L settings on their automatic transmissions, or for that matter, ever knew what they were for?

Oh, come on. Now you KNOW I want all the lights, all the buttons, all the cycles, all the dials AND the 2-way dryer door plus totally ridiculous and nonsensical cheap wood panel trim. I mean what kind of vintage appliance slut would I be? Please remember that one of the most important icons that got me into this obsession was a 1961 MOL GE Filter-flo whose beautiful white control dial lit up when you moved it from "OFF" to an active portion of the cycle. Now she was my HAL.

By the way, have you ever thought what the hotel room at the end of the movie would have looked like if HAL had killed Keir Dullea on a space walk and left cute Gary Lockwood alive to become the star child?

I just simply have all the various cycle buttons & combinations memorized fairly quickly, whether it be Norge, LK, Maytag, or GE (with the 8 or 10 rogrammed version which was my favorite of GEs.  It's all fairly intujitive and logical.  Not much variation between manufacturers really.  Only teh WCI65, and th subsequent 66 and 1967 models baffled me a little bit with their durable vs. man-made wash'n'wear/durable press cycle button combinations. 

Paulo, you are correct.  A couple of models had a rocker switch near the timer for soak or maybe mini-quick cycles and that changed the speed of the timer for the mini-quick cycle.