Maxell DVD blanks - slow write speed

I picked up a spindle of Maxell DVD+R the other day (impulse buy from a brick shop). Boy are they slow. They are rated at up to 16X write speed, but my old Pioneer DVD writer is only capable of writing at 2.4X speed. In comparison, it is able to achieving a write speed of 8X on my Sony DVD+R and DVD-R blanks (rated at 16X) that I picked up from Tesco a couple of weeks ago. Obviously it may also be the fault of the burner itself, but a quick check on the web later reveals frustration by customers who has moaned about data deterioration and slow write speed. Oops Maxell! And I thought you were a trusted brand. I bought countless of floppy disks of you once. How much the mighty have fallen...

I'll be ordering some Sony or TDK blanks later. They have never failed (Verbatim is good too), achieves 8X write speed consistently on my burner, and does not deteriorate even after two years (I have a Sony CD-R that I burnt eight years ago and has deep scratches all over - and I am still able to pull 100% data from it). Sometimes you do have to pay premium to get some quality...

Whilst I have no real problem about write speed, the complaints about deterioration concerns me greatly. I'll be definitely be re-archiving anything I've already burnt on the Maxell blanks onto another branded DVD. These I'll just use to burn stuff that I can give away to friends and families, where data retention probably isn't as important.

Update: Well two out of two of the Maxell blanks I used today has failed the moment I removed them from the burner. For whatever reasons two seperate DVD drive I have would not read it (including a Lenovo one). Never had a problem with all my previous DVD blanks from other brands so I will chalk this up to Maxell makes crappy DVD blanks. Avoid at all cost.