My GoPro has been trouble free. The only things I hate about it is that it takes a large capacity memory card to get any good video length.
The other thing is, filming motorcycle rides became not fun anymore. And that is all that I used it for.
I did not have any problems viewing the video on my Mac computer. Just pull the memory card from the camera and insert into usb adapter and import into photos or any video editing software.
It works fine on a motorcycle or skiing because there is air flow, but it doesn’t work (for long) in a track or race car where there is no air flow, or even recording a music video indoors (where it is cool but there is no air flow). It shuts down after a few minutes. You can’t use a fan because it will be very loud on indoor recording (we tried). We set ours to “tripod mode”, which is supposed to reduce heat shutdowns, but that limits frame rate annd other options, and it still overheats.
You’re right, you can pull the files off by removing the microSD. I think in the old days you could just plug the USB in, but they disabled that IIRC. Removing the SD is certainly workable.
The files being corrupted is VERY common if you search for it. It would play on the camera but no way to see or recover the file on the SD.
There is a trick supposedly to force the GoPro to repair the file, which is to start recording a new video and pull the battery while it’s still recording (this triggers the GoPro to automatically repair the new video when power is restored). So then you pull the SD, rename the file you want to recover to the new video's name, then plug the SD back in and insert the battery. This is supposed to trick it to repair the old file, but it doesn’t work. They could have a “recover all” option to help resolve, but they don’t. Only solution to make it functional again is to reformat the SD, losing all data.
I was going to try to send the HDMI video output from the GoPro into a computer capture card, but it costs something like $70 to get the GoPro adapter that allows you to output HDMI. I was about to buy it (kind of throwing away money because I already knew I was going to get rid of GoPro), that’s how much I wanted to get the video, but the video stopped playing even on the camera.
Picture quality is good, even sound quality for acoustic music, but it’s just been a nightmare to deal with the entire time.
) its $11.3 billion market cap in 2014. I hadn't kept track of it's stock price at all, but apparently the market has long felt what I've felt from a user experience. Hopefully the new owner will make the GoPro cameras and ecosystem better. 
