You can get clothes clean with a Frontloader. I have no experience with a top load HE washer, but a colleague has had a Calypso for almost 16 years. She loved it and when it died, she said she would not consider a front loader because of a cramped laundry room.
She went to Lowes planning on getting a Maytag Bravos, but though it was flimsy compared to her Calypso so she wound up with an LG even though it only rinses with cold water which was something she initially was trying to avoid. I would imagine that if you are not very careful in your laundering method and allow the machine to use cooler water etc, a good old wringer filled with steaming water properly dosed with a good detergent could remove film left in by inferior laundering. By the same token, if you don't work like a dog, you can get poor results from a wringer washer. I think using water of a temperature that you choose and having enough circulation in the washer combined with vigorous hand and arm action in the rinse tubs should definitely produce very clean laundry. Back when women used wringer washers, most of them hung laundry outside to dry and they were not going to hang dingy laundry outside for everyone to see. In those days you depended on soot from factories or coal-fired locomotives to make the clothes dingy. Paul Simon referenced that in his song, In My Little Town, with the line, "My mom doing laundry, hanging out shirts in the dirty breeze." I have read of the factory towns where wash day was determined by which direction the wind would be blowing from. Dear God, we don't have any idea of how richly we are blessed; not just for the laundry, but living in all of that pollution which the Republicans think is just fine anywhere, here or China or some other turd world country. Today, most women have to work outside the home to help support the family so they don't have time to use a wringer or even pay that much attention to the laundry.
I don't see how those big tub HE toploaders can do a huge load of laundry when Jeff has told me that it takes them a very long time to even get water to the center of the load. Maybe your friend should try doing smaller loads and giving them an extra rinse. It's sort of like the early low flush toilets that took two flushes to handle...well, heavy soil, too.
