I had a Miele Novotronic for 8 years and it worked great when we replaced it purely based on looks (dh wanted stainless). Now we have the Miele Crystal and it is even more wonderful (and looks awesome too). I ADORE how quiet our Mieles have been and that is very very important to me as we have an open concept kitchen and my "office" is the dining table near the dishwasher. Programming - read the manual...it is not rocket science, just takes a little fiddling. You do it once then it's done. Salt - find out whether you even need it. We don't due to soft domestic water supply and we have programmed our dishwasher accordingly. Rinse Aid - dishwasher works fine without it, but dishes don't dry as well. With our new dishwasher I have the rinse aid setting programmed to the lowest setting and will work up until I am satisfied with the drying. You can disable the rinse aid indicator/setting if your tabs include rinse aid - mine don't. I think having separate rinse aid makes sense so you can calibrate it. Tabs - Method Smarty tabs are easy to cut in half, but require a little pressure. Some of the "eco" tabs available to me in supermarkets and specialty food stores seem like they have less soap to begin with so they probably don't need to be cut in half. None of these have rinse aid built in. All of these tabs are cheap and readily available to me. Rinsing/scraping - I doubt rinsing will cause damage to normal dishes, but I never rinse, only scrape. The Miele manual specifically says that rinsing is not necessary. Stuff I put in the dishwasher - EVERYTHING! Even the worst pots and baking pans go in the dishwasher. Occasionally something doesn't come off 100%, in which case a 10 second scrub with a brush finishes the job. 3rd tray - LOVE Express - mine is 35 min

I too had this problem with an expensive Kenmore Elite but I decided not to let it bother me. I fill one powder dispenser and leave it open and make sure I have the Jet Dry department always filled. I never observed a lack of top notch cleaning after that, but I did give it to Habitat for Humanity when I got the top of the line Thermador (made by Bosch). The Thermadors and Bosch's are far better than the Miele's at their price points and they are at least as quiet as the best Miele's, which cost $1K more. Greg

If you have a hole for the air gap but use it for soap or whatever instead, you can always pull out the soap dispenser/lotion dispenser/reverse osmosis faucet etc., and put an air gap in there if you need to. It's a very simple swap. I certainly wouldn't encourage you to just opt out of the air gap if that would cause a health problem, but it doesn't. High loop and air gap are two approaches to the same issue - backflow. Air gap is the old fashioned way to deal with it, high loop is the modern way. Generally speaking, I'm a big fan (big fan!) of doing everything to code, but this is an exception. I don't know what TX is doing, but in CA I believe this code to be a remnant of older technology that's just waiting to be written out.

Sometimes you can get a hard water build up that interferes with the slides. Try opening the door and slide it back and forth several times to break up deposits. Then get a dishwasher cleaner that has citric acid in it and run it through the dishwasher.