We've never experienced any of the pains that I've read about PayPal. But, perhaps, it's due to our long-standing relationship.

Some smokers will never experience throat, lung or mouth Cancer. That doesn't mean I'm going to buy a pack of Marlboros tomorrow.

There are plenty, but PayPal is a huge business with many customers. It's difficult to know how often bad things really happen with PayPal compared to other services, because probably the vast majority of their customers in each case just get things done and never comment publicly on it.

It's also difficult to know how many of the horror stories really are horror stories, and how many are just someone upset that their terms were changed on reasonable grounds because of greater volumes or fraud risk or whatever. I've seen plenty of small merchants irate about a certain amount of their funds being held back as they started to trade more, but while some of the payment services do seem to be better at communicating these things and the reasons for them to their merchants, it seems likely that all of the payment services would have made similar decisions under similar circumstances.

This potentially distorted perception is a PR problem for all major payment services. Today Stripe still gets a warm reception on HN most of the time, but there's definitely an element of nostalgia and/or gratitude in that, and half a minute of searching will find you plenty of small merchants on other forums who describe their experience with Stripe in the same four-letter terms as others describe PayPal.