Has MSI's quality really slipped that badly?
My first PC build had an MSI board, and I used it for nearly six years. Never had a problem, until three of the capacitors went bad in its sixth year.
For me MSI looks like:
Socket A - pretty good VIA based boards
A64 754/939 - problems with random deaths, I made at least 4 RMA for top 939 board and in all cases they couldn't fix it so I got new as replacement
AM2/AM2+ - average boards, nothing special and not many overclockers were using them for some reason
AM3+ - some had good BIOS and ASUS CHVF modded BIOSes were actually based on RAID ROM from MSI but also for some reason there are not many good results on these boards and not many overclockers were picking them
Cheaper AM3+ should work on stock but many of them have issues after OC
775 - some were good , some were bad, still power section was weak
1156/1366 - Dr.MOS issues, simply many boards were burning at longer higher load, bad option for OC
1155 - cheaper boards = junk , problems with PCB, sometimes new boards had broken traces near memory slots and in some other places, also weak power section
more expensive 1155 boards were pretty good but were not overclocking memory as high as other brands
1150 - more expensive series seem good for CPU OC but I had no chance to test them, cheaper ... well I'm simply not touching cheaper MSI series
2011 - pretty good boards but are not overclocking memory above ~2600, actually can stick to 2400 , My X79A-GD45 Plus had some Dr.MOS issues and I got new from RMA
There are good reviews of new gaming series boards that are also in reasonable prices but I won't tell you how solid are they. I would pick Gigabyte, ASUS or ASRock over MSI anytime.
Looking at all MSI boards, you can pick single good models but in general all their boards were always pretty average.
MSI graphics cards were always one of the best but for last 2 years I see they are cheating customers and are releasing badly designed series. Also every card has warranty sticker even Lightnings what is kinda sad. Cards for overclocking where you can't even change cooling without losing warranty.