Of course, I've had pretty bad [1] hotel rooms booking directly with major chains as well.

[1] Bad as in little or no natural lighting, unusually small, etc. Some of the time a tall big city hotel abuts other buildings and has a lightwell and, especially on the lower floors, things can be pretty dark.

Please name the names so we can avoid your fate

Every hotel has 'good' and 'bad' rooms in this sense, and they will absolutely prefer putting their loyal/higher-paying/most-likely to complain[1] guests into the 'good' ones. The 'bad' ones are often the last on the list to get filled.

[1] That's because if the front-desk guy/gal has any agency in this, they will absolutely not try to put a Karen into a bad room. Because they don't want to deal with his/her freakout over the noise of the vending machine, or the elevator, or some other factor that they can't control, but will get the guest to complain to management.

I'm not up to doing that, because lawyers. Also, the fault really lies with the hotels; not the booking services (one hotel was in London, another in Manhattan).

However, if you search the English alphabet for the letters between "N" and "Q," you are likely to find the first letter of the name of each booking service (not hotel).

Talk about a chilling effect, lawyers silencing anonymous online message boards.

Well, I choose not to post anonymously. As a result, I am more careful about what I "say" online, than many (Actually, a lot of folks that think they are "anonymous," are not, in fact, "anonymous," if a Big Dog gets pissed at them).