Both my BR and BR burner are Asus, and never had a lick of trouble with either. More often than not it was codec issues with Nero6 that gave me any headaches, not the hardware itself.
But do take failure rates into consideration. If a million units are sold/used and you struggle to find more than 100 youtube videos and/or reddit posts by dissatisfied owners, that's still an excellent failure rate overall.
Its when a million units are sold and you have no issues finding 20k posts, that's when you should be worried.