It probably is the better choice. It seems the loggers and fallers out west have trouble with both in a shorter time than stihl and husky. I used 2 of the 7900s for fire wood and didn't have any trouble but it doesn't take much run time to cut 5 cords up either.
Some did, some didn't.
I think personal biases come into play too sometimes, with brands such as Stihl and Toyota having cultivated excellent reputations for reliability and quality that lend themselves to people glossing over problems at times.
Of course that works the other way with some personalities too.
It doesn't help that they look and feel different either, and I'm guessing in the timber game people by nature are mostly conservative, and as you've found the balance is quite a bit different with longer bars.
The broken AV spring was one thing that seemed to crop up regularly early on, but if you were a business owner you'd be having a serious little chat to someone that continually destroyed springs on your saws.
Some blokes are just rough on equipment too, and will kill anything. The local chainsaw/mower/OPE repairer used to be a plant mechanic at a nearby quarry and he was telling a me a few stories about a couple of characters like that yesterday. One bloke would even destroy gear in and on the crusher, let alone wheeled and tracked stuff.
A while back I asked Andy/redprospector why he was giving up his tribe of 7900's he used for his team in New Mexico and it came down to the simple fact they were due (can't remember how many years service) and he wasn't replacing them with same as the old Dolmar dealer had gone and the new dealer wasn't worth a pinch of poop (my words, paraphrasing his)
His current Husky dealer was much the same, so he was going to Stihl for the first time in a long time, purely as the dealer was very good, and in a production environment you want a saw fixed
now
He has a real soft spot for the 7900, reckoned it had been an excellent production saw for him and he kept his 7900 race saw.
