Anuvin, you've made my day
...and I've only just woken up!
I completely understand your aversion based on what you've written however although you've blamed the motors I think the actual problems you have are with electronics and physics, I think you've truly shot the messenger. The guide rods and things bending because they're accelerating heavy masses....well that's a design fault and nothing to do with the poor motors, I don't think you can blame them for this just because they're the ones asked to move things, if my boss gave me a rubbish shovel to move a ton of earth then I'd go through a few shovels. Also I'm not sure that securing your printers to the desk because of Newtons third law should be legal, printers are like pets and you should respect their freedom to roam! Your last few points are pretty close to my heart, electronics can be amazing but you can also get it phenomenally wrong particularly if you don't understand how things work or crucially if you're trying to save money. Things burning is generally over current issues and most people only understand switching a load to a constant voltage supply and then leaving it to its own devices, this is particularly bad when it comes to DC motors and can be an issue when you have steppers that you're driving at high voltages to get them to run fast but don't bother to think about current limiting.
Essentially, most FDM printers, and actually peachy but I'll address that seperately, are open loop meaning that the machine has no idea what's going on, no way to detect errors and do anything about it (like stop before it ruins your gear train). This really means that you need to be absolutely sure from your controller that when you ask your machine to do something that it does that and it does it successfully before you give it another instruction that relies on the last one having been done correctly.
Unfortunately you'll find me working with motors in pumps for the peachy (and I don't think you can convince me it's the wrong thing for the job [I'll be sure to put an optional temperature and over current feedback warnings for you ;)])