2005 Chevrolet Malibu Pros and Cons at TrueDelta: Starts and runs but has niggling problems by Geoffb

I bought this car used with 7,000 miles on the clock. Needed to replace a Plymouth minivan to carry the family of four. Wanted the room and reasonable gas mileage. The MAXX had an appealing combination of features like the adjustable rear seat, rear seat moonroof, rear seat entertainment. V6 power more than adequate, comfortable. In theory it was a good match.
I traded it last year with a sigh of relief. Except for the one time it's security system went to DEFCON 5 and wouldn't start WITH THE KEY it never left me stranded. BUT - it ate brake rotors with astounding efficiency. The steering lost assist on cold mornings. The CD player stopped ejecting CDs. Various knobs and buttons lost their lettering or self destructed. The heat seater would magically turn on by itself a great feature in summertime! The lever to fold the rear seats stripped out.
Am I being too picky? It was 'reliable-ish'. But the nuisance factor was very high. For a similar amount of money I bought a four year old Subaru Forester. It uses more oil than I would like but in 25,000 miles nothing broke or didn't work as intended. it doesn't have a bunch of mismatched buttons spread out on the dash and doors. Everything you need is right where it belongs and it works. I wanted to buy American but after four 'American' cars that proved to have poor long term reliability or quality problems I would hesitate to buy one of the Big 3 again. Maybe they need to put the engineers in charge instead of the bean counters?