Detox, I have the Gaggenau, so can't fully answer your questions. That said: 1. If you own one do you use it enough to warrant the $6000 price tag? If you're asking, probably not. You can achieve much the same effect for baking and roasting by putting a ramekin of water in your regular oven. In fact, I've recently started baking crusty breads and rather than wrangling them into the combi-steam, I put them in my big oven on my big pizza stone with a ramekin of water on a shelf (the usual, is a smaller pizza stone on a rack with a pan of water below). The same method works for roasts, or whatever you want to keep moist. The big difference is in blanching, steaming and poaching. I despise blanching and steaming on the stove. It works perfectly well with a pot and steamer insert, a bamboo steamer box in a wok or big pan, or a flower style folding steamer in a regular pot. It works in the microwave, either with just a spoonful of water in the bottom of the pot, or with an MW flower steamer. Or, that did work well until I was making a lot of veg for company and my favorite Pyrex pot broke from repeated thermal shocks. If $6000 is worth it to you to not have to do any of this the old fashioned way, it's worth it. If you'd rather have money than convenience, it's not. I should say that mine is fully plumbed. If I had to bother with a tank, I might think it wasn't worth it. Some people do the blanching/steaming/poaching in the steam oven not from laziness, like me, but to clear the cooktop for other tasks. Again, you can pay yourself for a lot of extra cooking hours to get it all done for quite some time with the money you'd save from the oven. But if you want it, ah, that's another story. It's not a fad. It's that technology caught up with the way people like to cook. Steaming is a classic technique. The steam oven removes some of the onus. But if it just seems like a clever toy to you, rather than the most beloved thing you could have in your kitchen, then it is. The worth is entirely in personal perception. I can't think of one thing I can make in my combi-steam that I couldn't contrive by conventional means. It's just a lot easier.

Our Gagg combi steam drains itself. Occasionally I wipe moisture off the inside of the door so it won't drip on the floor if I'm in & out of it a lot. There's a steam purge button that works by sending cool water into the oven, so you can open the door without getting a blast of hot steam in your face & kitchen. I'm not sure if the other ovens have that. So far we've used our combi for steaming vegetables, rice, reheating (60% steam), and baking (with & without steam). I have to admit, if we roast something without steam & it's likely to splatter, we use our self-cleaning oven, not the Gagg combi. The combi has a water-assisted cleaning cycle but we haven't had to use it yet, so I can't say how effective it is. When we used a countertop steamer, the kind with the stacked pans, the water reservoir always needed refilling. If we were going to spend the money on a steam oven, I didn't want to have to do that anymore, or wipe the water out. The Miele oven I examined had a much smaller capacity than the Gagg, to make room for the reservoir.

(Cross-posted in other Miele Steam Oven threads) We bought a Miele DGC 6800 Combination Steam Oven (non-plumbed) and a few months later on a whim descaled the unit. Right after the descaling process, my Miele steam oven gives me a 'Fault 20' whenever I try to do steam cooking. The regular convection cooking works fine. Wish I had something else! It's out of warranty even though we probably used it about 20 times. Now Miele is asking for $150 for a technician to come out and pay an additional $90/hr for labor + $ for parts!

I went through the same question some years back. Miele has more features for the $$, so I originally wanted that, but at the time they didn't have a combi/convection steam oven that could take 208V (what I had), so I settled with the Wolf instead. And I must say, I've been really happy with it. It works, it's not fussy. Yes, it doesn't have the color swipey screen the Miele has, but I'm not convinced I miss that all that much. Would I like a broiler? I think so, as it is something I use, but I do have another big oven with the broiler (that unit almost always takes a backseat to the convection steam unit) and I can use that when I'm broiling something, so it's not too bad. I've kept tabs on the Miele, and I've discovered that considering that if you don't get a plumbed unit, the Wolf is more forgiving than the Miele on how much water is in the tank (I'm pretty lazy and never fill it up all the way, and the Wolf lets me still use it as long as I have enough water). If you really want to go into the details about adjusting settings, moisture level, turning on upper element broiler, you'll want the Miele, but if you just want to use it, I think you'd like the Wolf. I certainly don't regret having to "settle" for it at all.