Providing the link to your source is always helpful so people can read up more about what's going on. I found the thread at dvinfo.net that you quoted.
IMO, given the fact that the OP in the link returned one of his cameras because it started eating tapes right out of the box makes me think this is an isolated incident. Like a bad batch of cameras or something got shipped to his area. Or, like one of the other posters said, maybe the some of the cameras ship w/less than perfectly clean heads. If a high percentage of HV20 users everywhere were having problems like those then we'd be hearing much more about it. The HDV format just isn't as robust as other formats, but that's part of the trade off of getting an affordable HD camera.
Also, using the "start/stop detection" in FCP while capturing is not a good way to find dropouts in my experience. I've had new clips created when there was no visible error and no TC break, I've seen visible dropouts happen w/o a new clip being created, and I've TC breaks create new clips w/o visible picture error. These are from other HDV cameras though, not the HV20.
Lethal