I've owned the embody for a little over a year now and I haven't experienced any issues with 1 or 2. I absolutely love the chair. That said it is rather expensive and what you can do is wait for their annual summer sale which is what I did.

I've done a bit of research into your #1 and I'm convinced that Herman Miller did not design the Embody's back support with posterior pelvic tilt in mind[0]. I think this is why you see the phenomenon of individual buyers preferring Embody chairs after sitting for a bit in a showroom, using the chair for about a month, and then selling the chair or getting rid of it.

Awhile back I borrowed an Embody for the weekend from a dealer and noticed that after sitting in it for an hour or two my lower back would invariably feel like hell. I tried pretty much everything I could think of, and found two things that helped:

1. Stretching and doing other exercises to change my pelvic tilt from posterior to neutral or anterior.

2. Attaching zipties from the back support to the hole in the bottom middle of the "spine" of the chair. This reduces the pressure of the back support.

I ended up buying a Steelcase Leap v2 due to price, but I'm pretty sure that if I tried hard enough I could get the HM Embody to be the most comfortable chair for my body ergonomically. I think it's just unfortunate that Herman Miller seems to completely ignore this problem since it seems to affect a number of their customers. None of the Herman Miller reps or dealers I've talked to seem to really understand this issue.

[0]: http://www.hermanmiller.com/research/solution-essays/the-ben...

Linked is an article about how Herman Miller designed their posturefit system to try to push your hips forward. IIRC the Embody doesn't use the exact same system, but I think that they designed the Embody with similar goals. My theory is that if you have deeply engrained posterior pelvic tilt then the gentle nudging of the back support is completely ineffective at getting you to tilt your hips forward, and only digs into you and causes pain.

I agree. The Embody is a great chair if you have pretty good posture. It is pretty rigid in the center (all the flexibility is on the sides), so that it forces your back into the 'proper' shape like a plastic mold. The problem is, it's a pretty hard chair, so if you have any 'irregularities', like, say, a bit of hunchback (thoracic hyperkyphosis), the hard plastic "pixels" will just dig into your back in all the places that stick out where they shouldn't.

There is a single adjustment knob for the back, but it adjusts the thoracic and the lumbar part at the same time. So if you have a rounded upper back, you'll adjust the knob to make the backrest a more deeply curved S shape to prevent the upper backrest from poking your shoulder blades. But then the lower part of the S gets deeper as well and it starts digging into your lumbar/sacral region. It's not easy to notice -- after 15 minutes in the store, I was in love with the Embody; after 1 hour at home, it felt like my lower back was covered in bruises from the hard plastic.

For this reason, I do not recommend the Embody to people with incorrect posture, or to people who don't like hard chairs.

Other things worth noting are the poor armrests (they have no back movement, so you can't move your chair close to your desk without lowering them) and the fact that you can't really recline very far in this chair because the back tension rises pretty fast after a certain point. Well, you can recline if you adjust the back tension, but it's a continuous knob, so it'll take you ages to go back your regular setting.