Wow, Brad, that's about the best, most thorough listing of IR learning issues and solutions! GREAT!

Ditto learning into URC. I carry a TS1000 that has always learned the codes I've needed.

That... is from years reading forum posts on here and troubleshooting with those suggestions in the field. Nothing more.
Credit to all those on here that have posted bits and pieces to that before me. Including Daniel himself many, many years ago.
Kind of reminds me how there are not a lot of DIY control solutions available in the market anymore. Most things have moved to dealer protected lines and password protected software. A real shame to the average DIY tweaker. Many of the best graphic templates you could get, came for free from DIY remote enthusiast.

I think the TSU-3000/3500 & 7000/7500 were the best at IR capture IMO. Something in the software for those models just did an awesome job at always correctly interpreting the IR code being captured.
If those couldn't capture an IR code correctly, you were truly dealing with a unique and PIA code :)

There was one thing that the TS1000 did better, and I'm not sure if it did all its other things as well as the NG line you like.

If you had a push and hold command, like a projector power command, you could concatenate commands to create a macro that looked like a long button push to the component.

You'd learn the command the regular way. Then you'd learn the command by covering the IR, starting the learn, and then removing the IR cover. This gave you the repeating part of the command. (I think this was mentioned above but there's a bit of a twist here.) Then you'd take these commands and make a macro of the initial command plus as many repeats of the "startless" command as you needed to get the results.

The TS1000 just spit out one long command. The NG remotes, and all others I've seen since then, always separated the repeat commands by enough time, or by a header, such that they were not seen by the component as one long command.