My god I couldn't agree more. I used a Tecan liquid handler for years and wow did I hate it. It was very easy to fuck something up or make a change in the software without an error being thrown or the user being notified; the GUI was absolutely a black box to new users and I had to write my own manual to walk labmates through what to do to run known protocols; there was 0 attempt at optimizing movements to save time; the machine required manual calibration every single time it was used in a shared environment to make sure that someone hadn't changed tip alignment, plate holder position, or plate specs manually or accidentally by crashing a tip; it was trivially easy to break the arm or tips if you weren't paying attention and they cost a fortune to replace; there was no version control etc etc.

Their hardware was also total crap. Both the main pump and tip cleaning pump failed on me two times without any notification being thrown, the arm failed once, tips broke countless times. Our regional Tecan rep was on a first name basis with me for awhile and I wasn't even the owner of the machine.

I almost ended up taking a Tecan engineer certification class just so I could use the equipment as a knowledgeable user. Tecan also wanted to charge me something like 15 grand for an arm and tip solution which would handle 1536 well plates which I was able to replicate with 1 cent worth of plastic shims and a few of their black 10 uL tips -_-

I will absolutely recommend that my lab looks into buying one of these.