Starting in 2005, I put 5 Champions with the flush tower in our new house. They almost never clogged. My wife really liked them, especially because I travel a lot for work. I don't think I kept a plunger in the house, or if I did, I lost track of where it was.
Sure, we had the problem where the red rubber gasket at the bottom of the flush tower would get a blister, and start to leak. But I did a combination of poking the blister with a pin, which bought some time, and then would call AS and they'd send me new ones for free, up until the time that AS swapped out the flush tower design for the current design. Then they sent me 5 sets of the new flush design, which I never installed, because they looked worse to me. I eventually had to buy replacement rubber gaskets for the flush towers at Home Depot, but those were cheap, and were made with longer-lasting rubber anyway.
The flush tower design itself was built so that the tank would fill to around 3 gallons, but only let a gallon and a half out when the handle was pushed. But that let the bottom gallon and a half out, so you had the weight of the top gallon and a half to push. But like others on this forum, the mechanism wasn't too reliable for me. What I did was to just wrap a piece of insulated wire around the body of the flush tower, and wrap that over the lever. That allowed us to get about a gallon out for a quick handle pull, but if you needed the power, you could hold the handle down and get all 3 gallons out, which was really cool. I'm not so much worried about saving water with toilet flushes. My family blows way more water in the shower, sink, and out the lawn sprinklers than to care whether or not we flush and extra gallon of water or not. Plus, the fact that the flush tower went all of the way to the top of the water level meant for relatively easy handle pulls, because there was less water above the valve pushing down on it.
I say all of this in the past tense, because after 8 years in the house with 5 Champions, we moved to our current house 11 months ago, with 3 toilets. And knowing that I would be travelling, I replaced 2 of the 3 toilets in the house with Toto Drakes, straight away. I had heard good things about Drakes, and I wanted to give them a try. Our local stores (Utah) don't seem to have Toto.
Quickly we noticed that the Totos would clog a lot more frequently than we were used to. And I had to acquire a new plunger, and a snake to deal with the Drakes. My wife was not pleased, and often a Drake or two would sit clogged for days until I got home from a work trip.
Since it had been 7 years since we bought a Champion, we weren't quite sure what to expect, but I decided to replace the last non-Toto in the house with a Champion 4 as a test, about 6 weeks ago. It was quick and easy. And has never clogged once since I put it in. Last week, after yet another problem with a Toto clog, that was bad enough for me to need to remove it from the floor, my wife and I confirmed that our pipes were fine and we just decided we'd had enough. I never re-installed the Drake, we immediately went over to Home Depot and bought a new Champion 4, installed it, and kicked the 11 month old Toto Drake to the curb, a couple hours before I headed to the airport. And the result? The clog-plagued bathroom is no more a problem. The Champion just works. I no longer worry about my wife having non-working toilets while I am away. I wonder how long the other Drake will last here?
Now, not to be too indelicate, my son seems to have larger than imaginable stools, but the Champion 1.28 gallon handles him with no worries what the Drake 1.6 gallon, uh...choked on.
So that's my experience. You experience might be different.