Maaaannnnn....I, too, thought you had found a good deal because someone was unloading the old controllers. I still need 2 more controllers total for 4-player control in those rare games that support it. Oh well.

They're $40 on Amazon currently. They were briefly $20 back in December. I'm guessing they'll be gone from shelves by the holiday season.

Maybe you should have taken more care to package them carefully instead of just tossing everything into a box which broke the controller. Not Sony's fault you couldn't protect it.

You know, Sony never has been very good at designing controllers to last... Over the years, I've had about 4 DualShock controllers and 6 DualShock 2 controllers, and of them, 1 DualShock and 3 DualShock 2 still work. A few of them failed on me the moment I took them apart to try to repair them, which may not seem that odd to some, but it's not a sign of a well-built controller at all when simply unscrewing the backings to do basic repairs can make it fail.

By contrast, when I took apart a Psyclone wireless PS2 controller of mine and swapped its X button with the X button from my damaged second Psyclone controller (a battery leak killed that one; stupid faulty AAA batteries), it works precisely as well as it had before I took it apart when I reassembled it. Better, in fact, since X no longer sticks now.

I think it depends somewhat on your luck. Both my Sega Mega Drive and PS1 Dualshock controllers still work fine.

Yet one of my Dualshock 2 controllers, 2 Xbox controllers and 4 computer mice have all broken on me.

They spent their money on bluray plus cell and sold the system at a loss...you don't expect their controllers to be bulletproof do you?
I also heard the battery inside tends to die fast so they probably used really cheap lithium rechargable batteries in there. oh well...what can you do.

While quality can vary, I've noticed that all of the DualShocks I have suffer from the same basic problem: the analog sticks get extremely loose after only a few months of use. One of my originals has such a loose left analog that it can no longer properly center (it's one of the ones in my 'dead' pile). Other frequent issues I experience with Sony's controllers also tend to revolve around the analog sticks, actually: having an analog stick get "stuck" in the upper portion of the control area, the L3/R3 buttons becoming unresponsive, and so forth. So far, only two of my DualShocks have failed me for non-analog reasons (1 original, one DualShock 2; both had a failing X button).

 I know the battary in my SIXAXIS rarely lasted for longer than two hours but I don't think that was a widespread problem.  I think I just had a shitty controller (ontop of the SIXAXIS being shitty of course).

 Indeed. The rumble is definitely worth the upgrade.

I've never had any problems with my Sixaxis controllers so I don't know how easily the pieces would go back on. My Dualshock 2 broke a while ago, the L1 button popped out and I couldn't get it back on. 

Yeah, both of my Sixaxis controllers have dodgey left analogue sticks, and often "rest" slightly higher than they should. Making my character move very, very slowly when I'm not using the controller.

I usually wouldn't mind, but it's a bitch when you're trying to snipe (cod4), or you keep falling off things (Ass Creed).