I'm only quoting you b/c you're the last person to express this sentiment.
This wasn't "if it ain't broke, don't fix it", this was a ticking time bomb, cross your fingers and hope you don't shut the computer down when it has 320 entries in the journal. I've seen plenty of hysteria in my day, but this is a case where there is a clearly identified failure mode, with a root cause, and a fix was offered to prevent/correct the issue. An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure... Unfortunately, the first fix was a rush job, so it introduced another failure mode. That's a big oops (which one could argue was caused by the level of excitement, but is really more a function of management pushing too hard to minimize the PR damage, and engineering bowing to that pressure and missing something).
Yes, Seagate did drop the ball with the firmware update I wont dispute. Ticking time bomb or not, you never rush into a situation where your updating firmware on something that is working unless you test it first. It would be like if I decided to update the firmware on the RAID array at work without testing and I hosed a years worth of backups. Part of the issue is thousands of wanna be techys ran out, downloaded a firmware update which was rushed and untested, didnt fully understand what the fallout of what will happen to their HDs if it fails, and proceeded to brick their HDs. After they bricked their HDs they proceeded to run to their favorite forums and starting spewing "seagate sux" and blah blah blah. Like I said, knee jerk reaction. I wonder how many million 7200.11s were unaffected by this problem?

Why will I stay away from Seagate for some time as a result of this and the 1.5TB issue ? Because they show that the controls at Seagate are sloppy right now, and I don't want to get caught in the next one. When you make low quality products for a while, you have to earn that trust back. Hence, while someone can say "WD had a recall on 1.6GB drives" that was a long time ago and they haven't had any other problems that I know of recently. Not to mention that their reduction of their warranty coverage doesn't speak positively to their confidence in the product they're pushing out the door these days...
Every company has had meltdowns over the years. WD had the problem with the 1.6gb's as well as other drives in years past. Maxtor had massive issues with all their drives before they we bought out. IBM had the infamous "Deathstars" and were bought by Hitachi iirc. Myself, Im building a new PC for myself, and guess what HD it will have in it, Seagate. Call me a fan boy, if you want but Ive built 5 different PCs this year for different people and have used all Seagate drives in them. Guess what, in the 5 machines I used 8 Seagate HDs, from 250s to 1.5s, none of them have crashed. I also am a 2nd and 3rd level tech for the State of WI you know what brand of HDs we use fail the most? Western Digital. I would say the failure rate on the WDs after 2 years is around 25%. We also use Seagates, and I would say the failure rate is roughly 5% on those. Needless to say, we stopped buying WDs.

Ive been actively building PCs since 1993 and have been working in IT since 2001. This is longer than some of the people that post here have been using a PC. In that time, in my personal machines, Ive had 2 of 2 IBMs die, 2 of 2 Maxtors die, 3 of 6 WDs die, and none of the 10 Seagates die. My time at my job has also proven to me that Seagate makes a fine product with the lowest failure rates of all the HDs we use.