1 hour of mini-DV takes about 20-22GB of space on my hard drive. With the hassle AVCHD sounds like, I think I'll stick with HDV. Hard drives are cheap, time isn't.

There's a bit of a trade off when it comes to compression: compression factor, quality, and computational efficiency. It's kind of difficult to get all three. Maybe when AVCHD was developed flash cards and compact hard drives didn't have the capacity that they do now, so the focus was on compression ratio above all else.

I agree, searching tapes for footage sucks. What sucks even more is when you accidentally tape over footage! I've resorted to a log book to keep track of which tapes have been captured and such.