I know this is gonna sound crazy but I have the absolute worst luck with electronics. I buy a LOT of gear. On the average I spend at least 10k on gear every year. Out of let’s say 10 boxes 5 to 6 will show up either DOA or some aspect of the item doesn’t work right from the gate. I got an octatrack 2 months ago. It started freezing 2 weeks after I got it. Now it’s unplayable. Sweetwater is sending me a new one luckily. I just got a tonverk a week ago. 2 days in the outputs and phono stopped working. No sound no matter what. Changed cables numerous times and spent three days trying to get it to work. Sub diving through every menu possible. Just got to Erica synths nightverb today. Data knob doesn’t work. I can’t even get through the menu. I press is to select a menu item. It does nothing. Right now sweet water owes me 3 boxes. The night verb sounds amazing btw. At least the one preset I have access to. Now whenever I buy something, I actually expected to not work when I get it. Why does this happen? Bad luck? Or is gear just garbage these days?
That is not my experience at all.
I don’t quite spend as much annually as you do, but in roughly 20 years the only two major DOA issues I’ve had were:
- New Virus TI2 was glitchy, Kemper sent me a new unit that was perfect
- B* K2 arrived with glitchy behavior, replaced with new, perfect unit.
Gear is really, really good these days. I spent the first decade of 2000s collecting digital '80s stuff (mostly Yamaha DX series) and the quality of the cheap sh!t we get today exceeds much of the premium stuff from yesteryear. You should expect something like 95% of the stuff you buy to work flawlessly.
Power, grounding and static issues are worth looking in to.
Don’t settle on bad luck until all rational options have been excluded. But when they have, it’s best not to tempt the fates.
Sweetwater sent me a DNII with issues, that was a replacement for my DNII with issues. 3rd one works though.
So, not drawing a conclusion but it does happen to everyone, and statistically if you’re buying more gear its going to happen more. its just math, math is your problem.
I think every issue I’ve had has been on a higher ticket item.
Novation Summit - I picked it up to move to a different room after 18 months or so and heard a screw rattling around inside. E-mailed Novation asking how to open the synth (no obvious external screws) and instead they just two-day shipped me a brand new one.
Sequential Pro 3 (pre-Novation) - needed a new mainboard in March 2020. Bit of a headache, had to pay to ship it to them despite being less than six months old.
Prophet 5 - shop was about to ship mine out when Sequential announced the early production mistake with the filter cutoff. Had to wait for a fix.
Groove 3rd Wave - had to swap out a board because the first run didn’t have the right USB protection or something. Replaced it myself, took minutes.
Dreadbox Artemis - audible screen whine, it’s like tinnitus torture. Dreadbox support was no help other than saying it’s not that audible in their experience. (It is.)
Relatively cheap stuff? All fine, never had an issue with any Behringer boxes, used Bass Station II or the Nymphes.
Bad Electrical Grid on your location? Do you have some sort of conditioner ?
I only had 2x bad luck, octatrack with bend pin (user error) , and analog4 with defect mainboard. Moog and Sequential stuff had no problem after years of occaional usage. (Electron is use far more often.)
Or is your house built on some sacred burial ground?
only had old roland korg and old mk1 elektron go bad on me - never new stuff
Ahhhh static. This is making my spidey tingle. I wear crocs (yeah I know) in the house. They create static 
A little plastic end cap popped off an encoder on a midi keyboard I bought 15 years ago. A channel fader on an old crappy Bhrgr mixer went screwy about 10 years ago.
Other than that it’s been smooooth sailing here in the lab.
(Knocks on wood cheeks)
I totally empathise with you because either I also have very bad luck or issues with products are massively underreported online.
I was going to speculate on some of my notions of why that might be, but as diplomatic as I try to be there’s definitely a danger of somebody taking it the wrong way so maybe it’s better sidestepped completely in the interests of not taking your thread off course 
To try and answer the thread title in a more positive way though, Doepfer are not garbagio and I often wonder how they do it. Their modules are very affordable by Eurorack standards yet you get super solid build quality with chunky aluminium panels, well mounted knobs, through-hole components on the older ones (mostly still available new) and supposedly incredibly good support, often from Dieter himself. Though I wouldn’t know that, because I haven’t had a single issue with getting on for 400HP worth of their modules or two of their cases. They’re like a taste of how things could be. Love them.
Where are you located and how is the power situation? Old buildings or crappy cabling can be a problem, especially since you mentioned static.