I had an alpine 9825 in the truck for awhile. It was a good unit and is now living in my dads jeep. It's now 5 years old and still working great even after being rained on a few times and with all the dust and ****.
I have a pioneer premiere 960 in my truck, while I have replaced the ribbon cables to the faceplate 2 times (once warrantied, second time cost me $25 off ebay) I contributed that to opening it when it was extremely cold because since then I've kept it closed till the truck is warm and not had a problem.
Also, I had a ground issue in the pioneer that is caused from hot swapping the pre-out cables so really it's your own fault if you have one. I fixed this by replacing the pico fuse on the pre-out ground with a piece of 22ga. wire.
I had a deh 1400 from god knows when in the GF's s-10 and while it wasn't feature packed, it was ancient and never let me down. Had good sound for the price ($20 off ebay).
So I wouldn't be afraid to go with pioneer. Their "quality issues" that everybody talks about are almost all contributed to the ground issue, which won't happen if you turn the unit off before you swap patch cables around.