Well, more reliable is an objective statement (usually). You can give it a metric, and then say something is, or isn't, more reliable. Not "better." Not even "better designed."
You could certainly say "better reliability" or, really, "better" a lot of other things, like "designed," because reliability /is/ a pretty standard design goal. What good is something that doesn't work, afterall?
Because design incorporate other elements- and designing for reliability might get rid of other aspects that you do appreciate.
Sure, like frequent opportunities to work on it!
Or you might just not care about reliability in comparison to other things.
Right, you may have a back-up vehicle on call at a moment's notice, for instance. Or the car might be a showpiece.
But none of those make the more reliable car less reliable, or the unreliable one more so. The difference is real, and the reliable one is better by that metric.
There are /plenty/ of quite objective metrics about cars, after. That reliable car might be an electric golf cart that goes 10mph at most, and the unreliable one a muscle car that can do 120 easy. Or the unreliable one might be an old model T that can barely hold together doing 45, and the reliable one a tesla roadster that can out-accelerate the muscle car.
As much as someone defending an unreliable vehicle might like to suggest that it's positive qualities are somehow intertwined with it's defects, that's not necessarily the case (it might be, but it needn't always be so for everything it's compared to).
edit: nope, not going to respond to the personal stuff
4e summons typically have half (bloodied value) the hit points of the summoner...
Hey! You looked something up, congratulations. I just looked up Simulacrum (and, damn, no wonder people have been going on about it being broken). But, yeah, a lot of them... now that I think of it, most that were actual class dailies ... I've gotten used to the latter because I've not had a dedicated summoner in my long-running campaign for quite a while, but have a number of weaker item or theme powers that do lesser summons, often requiring that surge to have significant hps.
Of course, the wizard had the lowest hps of any class, while Simulacrum might be used on a creature with many more hps than the caster (5e does have remarkable high hps at the level you get simulacrum), and the simulacrum lasts indefinitely vs at most one encounter.
many also offer the wizard other advantages like the Summon Shadow Serpent power (2nd level) where the wizard can also see through it's eyes and use it as a spy. Or the Fire Warrior who can also make opportunity attacks when commanded to do so, or the spectral hound that gives you +5 to Perception and can be sustained with a minor action...
Sure, your summon might make an OA using your OA action and/or an attack using your standard action, or even give you some bonus... "can be sustained with a minor action" btw, is a limitation, not a selling point, it's like Concentration, that way, but it keeps you from using that minor action for anything else, every round...
4e summons were tightly phrased to maintain the action economy in the interest of balance, which was a profound limitation compared to most other eds, and especially compared to Simulacrum...
As for Simulacra it takes 12 hours to cast requires enough snow or ice to make a life size replica of the creature, pieces of said creatures body to insert in said ice or snow, and a 1500gp ruby. The simulacra has no equipment so you better have the components of those spells you want it to cast or the weapons and armor for it to fight.
Big deal. Equipment isn't exactly prohibitively expensive for high level wizards, and you can make it as far in advance as you want, since it's not going to just go poof or turn on you or anything.
For the 4e summons you need...nothing absolutely nothing and you can perform it over and over again daily (or if it's an encounter power, personally not sure if there are any, every encounter).
I can't recall an encounter summon, either, probably deemed too much on some level... encounter powers rarely had durations beyond end-of-next turn, so you might summon something that lasted for 6 seconds or so, if such a power were to exist at all. And, I mean, yeah, you can have that 4e summon, in one of your encounters, each day - a dedicated summoner might have one available in as many as 4 encounters, by using all his dailies on 4 different summon spells.
As opposed to the simulacrum in all of them, and doing whatever else you need outside of combat, while using /all/ your slots for whatever else you wanted.
