Ease of servicing brifters How easy are "brifters" (e.g. Shimano Total Integration or Campagnolo ErgoPower) to maintain and adjust as a hobby cyclist at home?-- Although quite a lot of road bikes have them (including even light touring-oriented/adventure bikes such as the Salsa Vaya or Genesis Croix de Fer 10), I have often heard even from competitive cyclists that they are extremely fussy and hard to keep working optimally. How true is this?-- I keep hearing that, for example, long-distance tourers and others focused on dependability avoid them due to their apparent fickleness and complexity. However, are brifters really that unreliable, or are these people just in the "tail" of the distribution of cyclists, those who cannot afford failure in even the rarest of cases?
There was a questionnaire on Bikeforums on this topic and here you can see the results: Brifters - how reliable are they?
39 people gave their votes and obviously for most people brifters did not break at all.

The second question is about working optimally. To be honest I am yet to see a brifter which does not work optimally. Brifters have very little to no setting up, so they either work or don't work, no middle line there.
Campagnolo brifters are known to be easily serviceable (assuming you have the parts), but Shimano are serviceable to some extent as well.