I agree that none of the stream recorders is perfect and this is dissatisfactory. However I can record almost all streams that I need with Replay Media Catcher, WM Recorder and rtmpsuck.

And I strongly disagree that WM Downloader is better than WM Recorder. In my experience, WM Recorder is the most powerful Windows Media and Real Media recorder. It is the only program that allows to capture Windows Media and Real Media streams (in the PRO mode) as well as download them (in the ADA mode). Moreover, while other applications use Miscrosoft code (and this is illegal) and can be sued for that, WM Recorder code was written from scratch. The developer of WM Recorder was even praised by Microsoft!

I will be surprised if you will find a Windows Media stream that can be downloaded by WM Downloader, but can't be downloaded or captured by WM Recorder.

The interface of WM Recorder is a little bit complicated because it need to support several recording modes. But it has a user guide and video tutorials that make the learning process very easy. And you only need to hit the Record button to record with it. So I don't think users will have many problems with the software.