Sorry to break the news to ya but... it's not always the engineering department that's to blame. I was an intern at Whirlpool's German R&D department (where the first Duets were made) and the engineers told me they wouldn't buy the newest washers they had to designed themselves because of the low water usage that the marketing department wanted to see. Engineers rarely get to design what they want to - they get orders from marketing to make machines use less water, spin faster, run quicker, have a larger capacity etc. and for a manufacturing costs, of course. What you end up with is machines like the LGs that use plasic parts where metal would have been a much better choice. Sadly, many machines and homes had to be damaged before metal brackets were used and more shock absorbers were added.