Not all Netgear stuff is utter crap. We bought some Netgear GSM7328S' a couple of years ago when we moved our news room. Once they were configured (which could only be done properly in IE and required a firmware upgrade) we never had a moment's trouble with them.
Never used one of those but the GSM7324 and GSM7312 were useless. The CLI is very IOSish but not so very quirky and the firmware for them was shoddy. SSH is supported in them but you can't use it because it makes the switch unstable and slow. The GSM7324 had some design flaw which seems to randomly kill them as well. We bought 5 and 4 of them had died within 6 months with weird PCI bus errors that cause it to get stuck in a boot loop. The diagnostics on them also completely wipes clean the flash leaving only the bootloader and nothing else like serial numbers or model numbers.
NetGear technical support at least in Europe was actually really good though. Called them up and they were very helpful and quick. We lost a set of the rackmount brackets and they shipped us a spare set with no payment or questions needed.
The L3 non S model switches are actually some OEM design that Netgear bought in and Dell used a similar design for some of their early switches. I can't remember what the original brand was though but the documentation and CLI were identical.