Yes, I recall Replay, et. al. I'm not interested in the "used" market. As I noted earlier, I've seen used machines, e.g. Panasonics like yours, selling for more — often far more — than their original list price.

I'm still hoping for some feedback to my original question:
I've got to believe there are some fellow Outlaws who've taken the plunge on one of the current crop of DVD recorders, either to transfer their VHS libraries to DVD, save content from their DVRs, or as a VCR replacement.

However, maybe I've just researched this to death and others have come to the same conclusions that I have: the current crop is generally wanting, quality and reliability are spotty, and the choices aren't getting any better. One is basically rolling the dice on any of them, albeit the Toshiba units seem to fare a bit better in the consumer-submitted reviews.

From what I've read in the various user-submitted reviews, complex editing like you describe isn't a easy task on any of the DVD recorders. On some, it's relatively straightforward to do things like define chapters to exclude the commercial breaks in a recording before finalizing the disk, but beyond that the reviews lead me to believe that editing ranges from the tedious to the impossible. Even tasks like labeling chapters seem to be fraught with tedium, especially given the generally poor reviews the remotes receive.

You'd probably have to carefully plan the order in which the content was burned from the DVR to the DVD. I suspect it would be easier to do as much of the editing as possible on the DVR first. The Philips DVDR3575H/37 can copy from non-commercial DVD to the HDD, but I don't know if that's something your DMR-E55 can do. I also believe you'd need a DVD recorder that supports DVD+R/RW as editing appears more limited with other formats.

Based on what I know today — from reading, not experience — if I were to undertake such a task, I'd burn the content to DVD from the DVR, then rip the DVD on one of my Macs, convert the desired video to QuickTime, use editing software like iMovie HD or Final Cut Pro to assemble the content into the desired flow, then burn a disc of the results. There'd probably be some loss in quality along the way, so whether or not this would produce a good result remains to be seen.

I've done editing like that both on my DMR-E80 and on a PC - it's worlds easier on a PC, if you can get the content there...