I grew up with a central vacuum system and had one installed in my current home when it was built 9 years ago. I'm not an expert but did a lot of research over the years so here's my take on your questions.

1) Best Brands - My parents built a big, brick house (Home Alone house) back in the late 80's and their builder put in a Nutone unit as many other homes in the neighborhood had. It worked fine but sometime around 2000 the motor unit burned out and my parents replaced it with a MD Silentmaster unit. Both are bagged units but only needed to be emptied a few times each year. In my current home, our builder put in a Vacuflo copycat filtered cyclonic unit with the Dirt Devil label. It was very powerful and very loud. Emptying the bagless canister was disgusting and dog hair and dust would coat the pleated filter so with each emptying you had to remove the filter and bang it against the ground. There would just be a giant dust cloud. I'm not sad that the motor died within three years. We replaced it with a bagged MD central vac unit like my parents. It's much quieter, very powerful and so easy to change the bags when needed. I will never go back to a bagless central vac system.

2) Installation Considerations - Both my parents and myself had our builders put the system in so we didn't provide too much input. I did get to pick the general location of the inlets but not the exact placement. There are a couple of inlets I would have preferred to be in a different spot based on furniture placement. For instance, the one in our family room is on the wall behind our couch. Granted, our couch floats in the big room so it's not blocked but just would prefer it be on a different wall. We have regular inlets for use with an electric hose as well as vacpans to sweep up small messes without needing the hose. About a year or two into owning this house I had an installer put in a "Hide a Hose" inlet on the main level of our home. If I were building again, I would only install the Hide a Hose inlets. I am not a fan of dragging around the long hose and wrapping it up when I'm done as you do with a traditional system. They now make battery-powered electric heads for hide a hose which work just as well as a normal powerhead. We also made sure to have an inlet in the garage so that we can clean our cars and garage floors. If I were to do it again, I'd have two. One in the front of the garage by the driveway and one on the unit as it is now.

3) Maintenance & care - The bagged units are virtually maintenance free. In the last six years I haven't done anything with the MD unit besides change the bag.

Overall, I think I will always have a central vac in the homes I live in. However, I don't think that they are for everyone. If you're someone like me who uses the hose attachments a lot for dusting, cleaning dog hair off the couch, etc. then they're a great option. But if you just want something to quickly do your floors then a regular vacuum might make more sense. My parents are in their 70s and never really use their central vac anymore. They no longer have kids or pets in the house so they get by with a Riccar upright and Dyson cordless. I also have a Dyson cordless and self-emptying Roomba that get a lot of use.

We acted as the general contractor on our home build 15 years ago, so we installed a Beam central vac system. The power unit is in my basement workshop and the discharge is plumbed outside via its own dryer-style vent. Its a bagless unit and does a geat job. My big plus is that the discharge, which has to contain some sort of dust/dirt particles when using any vacuum, goes to the outside, its not recycled into the house. Upstairs we have 4 inlets and 2 vacpans, in the walkout basement we have 2 inlets, plus one on the power unit. We have a hose and power head on each level. When emptying the catch bin, we just dump it into the bottom of an empty trash can. No problem. We use a powered hose and the electric power head does a great job, and the manual brush head is great on tile and wood flooring. Moving the hose around is no issue, just grab the two ends and pull it, it pulls easily with no carrying. We call it the gray snake. To store the snake, we have a garden hose style bracket in the front hall closet, just place the handle on the hook and loop the hose. We love our central vac!