> ... VHS players rapidly became throw-away items – eventually nobody really cared if they only lasted a year or two.
I don't know if I'm losing my marbles, but I don't ever recall a time growing up when my family (or anyone else I knew) were buying a new VCR every year or two.
Personally I'm more of a fan of minidisc. You can get minidisc players for $100 or so on Ebay and they occasionally show up at the local reuse center for less than that and my experience is that 100% of the minidisc players I've picked up worked (had one fail in six months though...), in contrast to about a 40% success rate with cassette decks. You can buy minidiscs in bulk from Japan for about $1.50 each, which is cheaper than Type 2 tapes. Portable minidisc players are available and can be plugged into your computer via USB to record music with names for the tracks.
My reuse center got two DAT decks, one of which looked terribly trashed, for $200 a piece. Nein Danke!
MD pricing can definitely be hit-or-miss, especially on those desirable USB NetMD units. But enough were sold that a little patience all but guarantees you'll find something satisfactory.
Today I think of VHS as ideal for people who want to get into an obsolete format. I often see decks for sale for $12 that work great at our reuse center and prerecorded tapes with great moves up to 2005 or so are $1-2 there or the Salvation Army. The decks I see are late models which have automatic tracking and VHS HiFi and are highly reliable -- commercial movies are usually encoded in Dolby Pro Logic and often sound more cinematic than many DVDs because the average DVD has a NERFed 5.1 track because they assume you're going to play it on a two-channel system.
All of our VCRs lasted a very long time. My parents had a Toshiba VCR from the late 1980s as well as a Sony Hi-Fi model VCR from 1995, both of which lasted for years and years, even in spite of damage and neglect from use (and misuse) by young children.