Although I was with a major Canadian electronics retailer, my two bits worth is probabably of minimal value. I say that because despite there being scads of A/V receivers, I never paid them much attention. I had to sell them so needed to be informed but they held no personal interstate for me at all.
That being said, the brand that appealed to me the most was NAD. Granted that was when they were a newcomer to that product category but what I liked about them was the simplicity - that and they sounded good in two channel - speakers not withstanding. The other brands on hand for comparison were Yamaha, Pioneer, Pioneer Elite (even though not an Elite dealer we had some anyway), Sony, Sony ES, Denon and Harman Kardon. Most receivers I found too busy as in an overabundance of controls and settings. The NAD was pretty much Surround On / Surround Off. I liked that but not sure how or if they evolved afterwards.
I would have to go Yamaha as my next favorite. At least they made their own processors and did not release those they used in their own products to the rest of the industry. At least that used to be the case. I also saw value in Yamaha's YPAO room calibration feature. Probably not exclusive to them anymore but emphasizing it's usefulness sold some of those receivers for me. I used to like telling customers that while it was doing it's thing, for however how long it took, they had to bugger off and vanquish all kids ands pets so there was no extraneous noise in that room whatsoever until the process was over.
I have difficulty understanding the appeal of myriads of features and buttons. Is GUI still around? All that did was confuse the hell out me as it did most of the customers I demonstrated for. I know someone with a 2 year old Onkyo and he showed me a user manual you could commit suicide jumping from. All he wanted to do was switch to one particular surround mode which it definitely had but it eluded us. He called the retailer who were no help but his service provider figured it out. A piece of home entertainment electronics should not be that complicated. Another plus for Yamaha - they were not too bad in that respect.
I remarked to some of the equipment reps that I found multi channel audio to complex and not user friendly. The begrudgingly agreed but said it was a Japanese thing - the more buttons and features, the better.