To me the moving from a TL to a dryer got just as many things dropped on the floor as doing the FL to dryer does. Except no socks or small items fall between like they did with the TL. I think it is possible some brands are worse on the smell/gasket thing. Could be the material they use for their gasket, so you might want read reviews. As for the washer getting dirty - the non HE TL I had did get dirty. It had a ring around the drum kind of where the water line was that I had to wipe down on a regular basis. My old FL did get dirty in the gasket folds and I did wipe that every now and then just like I did the drum on the TL. My new LG washer doesn't have a gasket with folds and has a slightly tilted drum so never have any water or anything that gets sitting there. I can add clothes whenever to mine too. Never an issue. Clothes get really nice and clean too. Unfortuntatley I'm not seeing the benefit of the drying not taking as long time. I think there is something wrong with my dryer. Jeans even after the high spin cycle is still a long time to be completely dry. I don't want damp clothes coming out of the dryer.

Speaking of how much I like the front loader - one of the things I really like about it is that I can wash rugs in it - not the flimsy ones but the ones with stiff backing. They say professional rug cleaning but some of the ones I have are so inexpensive it's not worth the price of professional cleaning. So I tried washing one in the FL once - figured if it fell apart I'd throw it away. It turned out great. So today I washed two rugs I've had in my kitchen for a long time. They're brown oriental type rugs so they hide dirt but they were grungy so I thought I'd wash them. A really weird thing happened. These rugs were (I thought) exactly the same. At least they looked exactly the same before I washed them. One came out beautifully - looks like new. The other one looks entirely different - the colors and pattern are kind of muddy and muted - kind of yucky looking. It almost seems like one was synthetic and one might have been wool - the one that doesn't look very good. So I put the good looking one back in the kitchen and the yucky looking one is in my laundry room. It doesn't look so bad by itself but looks terrible next to the good one. Anyway, FL works great for washing the rugs but you take your chances on whether the rugs are really washable or not. By the way, my normal cycle is 45 mins but there are cycles as short as 30 mins. Drying is fast since the washer spins things so dry.

This advice would upend a lot of people's laundry routines. For some it's impossible to follow without buying new clothes and linens, or a smaller washer. And it doesn't make sense to me. Even with a 2/3 full drum of identical items, the spin won't start out perfectly balanced. The asymmetric forces from such a load could be just as bad, or worse, as from a smaller load. And, during the tumble phases, the big load exerts more force on the bearings than a small load. So I don't know what the answer is, but I don't think this is it. BTW, Cavimum, I doubt that you have a Miele with a 4 cu ft drum. The W48XX series drum is a little over 3 cu ft. The originally advertised 4 cu ft was IEC capacity, which means it holds as much as an agitator washer with a 4 cu ft drum. IEC isn't used anymore in the US. For a present-day example, look at the LG WM3170CW on the US and Canadian LG sites. It's 4.3 cu ft in the US, and IEC 5.0 cu ft in Canada.

M J, Frontloaders are much superior washing performance to the HE "impeller" toploaders. Washing a comforter or other large/bulky items in those is an exercise in futility, there's no way the impeller can overcome gravity to entice the item to roll over for thorough washing. A frontloader by design lifts and rolls the items over through the wash (and rinse) water. As others have said, stay away from washing everything in cold water. Even a designated "Cold Wash" cycle. While it's true that many machines nowadays add some hot or warm water to the fill on a Cold setting so the water in the tub is minimum 60°F to 70°F, using cold exclusively for everything has a large chance of causing mold/residue/odor in the machine, as well as shortening the service life of it. I recently repaired a Samsung frontloader that was destroyed by bad laundry habits in 4 years 11 months. Liquid fabric softener was used on every load to large doses and too much cold washing led to waxy residue on the exterior of the drum (where clothes don't rub on it) that corroded the drum support. The drum broke loose during spin and wore a gash in the outer tub. The machine has an onboard water heater with 1) a Sanitize cycle that heats to 150°F, a Heavy cycle that heats to 115°F, and a tub cleaning cycle that heats to 140°F. Regular use of any/all of those cycles would have kept the waxy residue from accumulating. I tested the designated Normal cycle and a couple others on it, and with 130°F+ input temp from my water heater, I got 80°F on Warm and 92°F on Hot. Consider the difference between 80°F (which is less the body temp) and 115°F or 140°F regards to dissolving waxy residue or greasy laundry soils ... and it becomes clear why washing primarily or more-often-than-not in cold water is not a good thing. One may not see residue insidethe drum where the clothes rub but it accumulates where the clothes (and you) can't reach ... on the outside of the drum and on the inside of outer tub.