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One must remember that what one reads on these boards is a heavily biased sample.
For a start, we have seen many single-digit posters on here with catastrophic failures, those people would have never joined the forum if their car was running well.
The experts that post on these boards also greatly bias the sample. These guys have generally been around for some time, long enough to see just about everything and to create very good names for themselves in the Porsche community. This leads to them getting more and more work because of their reputation, then because they are so busy they will tend to increase their prices. Your average Joe will not pay a higher rate for a simple job that any mechanic can do, so they use the local guy for the simple stuff. When things go seriously wrong though, they hunt out the expert, money no object. This means that the experts will see far more than their fair share of serious failures. Also, when an expert shares their knowledge in a forum regarding IMS bearings or D-chunk failures or broken crankshafts or whatever, forum members actively seek them out when such a thing happens to their car, further compounding the sample bias of forum members.
All of what I am describing is completely innocent by the way. No one is out to scare you for their own benefit or anything like that, it is just that the statistics can be very deceiving without looking at where the sample data has been collected from.
My personal belief is that we are very fortunate to have this bank of knowledge as a reference point, just about every common and not so common failure is described somewhere on these boards, most of the time with a solution. Just like in every other aspect of life however, certainly in this "information age", we are bombarded with "information" and "mis-information" and the most successful people are those that filter out the noise from the message and more importantly interpret that message the correct way.
Just my 2c
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