Yeah I have to agree. While the DS1054Z is crowed around here as the bee's knees for bottom end DSOs there are too many compromises not to make it frustrating to use. It's noisy, laggy, the UI is crap, the controls are soggy and the probes are just shit. You can get the job done but it's like living in a snake pit.
If I'm honest I'm finding it hard to need a DSO. For digital stuff a Saleae does the job. Really slow stuff, a logging DMM does a beter job as it has some proper measurement resolution (U1241C does 40 readings per second at 10,000 count resolution).
And for that twilight zone in the middle, where the DSO usually wins, the trick is to make your one shot event repetitive! Usually employing the function generator, a BJT and a couple of resistors to accomplish that.
I've said as much myself... I bought my 1054Z primarily for diagnostics regarding my RC modeling hobby, in particular my miniature quadcopter habit.
They are essentially a collection of 4 brushless motors, each one with a microprocessor generating PWM to drive FETs in a dual H-Gate motor driver controlled via bit-banged high-speed PWM or pseudo-serial by another micro with accel & gyro sensors (sometimes GPS and magnetometer as well), which is in turn directed by another processor running a software-defined radio transceiver, which is then in turn controlled in my transmitter by a software-defined radio transceiver, and finally by another micro running a hybrid OS/GUI for parameter control via analog signal from pots and/or ratiometric Hall-effect sensors through its built-in ADCs.
Fortunately (?), all of this is "hobbyist experimental" grade gear; none of it comes close to aero or even commercial/industrial controls in terms of precision or redundancy requirements.
For this, the 1054Z and my 2465 are all I should ever need for the foreseeable future. I put hands on the 1054z and the 1104Z before I bought; the difference is considerable, no doubt. The 1054 is a barely 50MHz DSO you can abuse to 100MHz BW; the 1104 is a 100MHz DSO you can abuse to 200MHz BW and the fundamental shortcomings of the 1054Z are quite visible next to the 1104Z, and those of both are glaringly visible to anyone who's used a good CRO.
But bottom line is I couldn't justify the difference in price to myself for my needs, and certainly couldn't to my wife who bought it for a present.
I have one of the early cheap Chinese clones of the Salae 16-CH LA; I bought it and installed the hacked software from the cloners' site long before I ever discovered it was all ripped off from them. It is actually a surprisingly capable bit of kit, which I used quite a bit when I started tinkering with Arduino due to my interest in ArduPilot. It was fun, but I got "math-defective programmer burnout" multiple times one on top of the other and had to get away before my brain exploded. Haven't been back to Arduino since.
Cheers,
mnem
All those bits keep byting me in the butt!