After talking with a couple repair guys, they recommended going with Amana or Whirlpool as far as reliability goes. This is the kitchenaid (made by Amana) I have on order currently.
KitchenAidŽ: Welcome to KitchenAid.com
I also noticed while going through the store, the cheaper models actually used much less energy according to the energy star tag. After a little thought and observation, I found this was because the higher end models have a heating element vs the cheaper ones don't. However, with the higher end models you can turn off the heating element and retain the efficiency of the cheaper models. So, that is at least one thing that makes it hard to compare efficiency.