I have a Stages and 2 Quarqs. I don't see your issues with the Stages. I just don't see dropouts. And, yes, I know what I'm talking about - I've manually imported the data into Matlab.

The most serious problem I've seen is that it occasionally screws up cadence, which in turn screws up its power estimate. Particularly at very low cadence (track start).

And, of course, I could be having the whole L/R issue, but that's more difficult to identify just looking at Stages data by itself.

This isn't say you and your 5 guys aren't having the problem. Just that I'm not.