Right Wrong
What you pay for is what you get. When we remodeled our home 5 years ago, we replaced over 100 ceiling recessed lights (both floods and spots) with LED fixtures. Same for about 20 recessed exterior fixtures in the exterior soffets. Aside from the obvious energy savings (we plan on staying for another 10-15 years) , we are getting older and didn’t want to keep getting up on ladders to frequently replace the incandescent fixtures in our high 10-12 foot ceilings. In five years we’ve had to replace only ONE of those fixtures. The net value (energy payback savings and risk avoidance) clearly made sense for us. If you just have a few easily reached table lamps or only plan on staying in your home a few years, probably less important.
Your experience suggests you might have used one of the lower quality LEDs flooding the market (from China perhaps) which have a much higher failure rate than quality bulbs and fixtures from Cree, Phillips, Feit etc. Also, as you note, there is a big problem with using LED bulbs in older fixtures, especially if its on a dimmer circuit. For the past decade and perhaps the next year or two, LEDs are the way to go but CFL certainly appear to have a high likelihood of commercialization.
Anyway, thanks for sharing your experience.