Why am I unlikely to get help here?
You can call my paranoid if you like, but I find the opinions and perspective of this community to be marginal at best. It's in their best interest to give bad advice so they can own a larger piece of the pie, uncontested. This leads to all sorts of strange tactics, including defamation, persistent pessimism, and outright lies.
Aside from that, they (we) can't really give you good advice regarding mining. In the current market, the winner is the person who has the lower $/GHs mining the soonest. As soon as those products hit the network in mass, the network adjusts, and that level of efficiency is the new status quo. If you don't make the majority of your ROI in the first month, chance are you never will. Add to that the wild-west nature of the bitcoin ASIC manufacturing scene, and you've basically got a dice roll.
That's why we can't really help. Even if we give you perfect advice, it's suspect, biased, and frequently on very shaky grounds.
I'm just looking for a company that won't take my money and disappear into the ether.
Bigger names are better in this case. Cointerra is the only one that fits that description in my opinion. We'll have to see if any of the other companies put some effort into legitimatizing themselves. I really want to build my own miner based on CoinCraft chips.
I can't seem to find an actual website for BitMain, though.
BitMain is a bit of loose cannon. They're a small chinese company, and they're not technically allowed to export these, I don't believe. So they sell to an agent that is willing to play in the gray market. Their chips appear to be solid, although I've seen some issues with their cgminer integration, especially for *nix boses. It didn't stop me from buying their product, and I have one running just fine... but it's not terribly cost effective right now. I think I paid $40/GHs. The bare chip itself comes in around $5/GHs, so there's room for another board manufacturer in that market.