Maytag's spin/drain was a hold over from that awful AMP design that held sand between the inner and outer tubs. They were more right than they knew when they used the ad copy, "one tub for the clothes, one tub for the dirt" except that the sand commuted between the tubs. I remember when neighbors came home from a local beach and the mother ran the bathing suits through repeated warm rinses in the AMP and finally just hung them outside to dry to finally be able to get rid of the sand. She could have rinsed them in the tub and done better with sand disposal. Just like GE and others, when Maytag switched to a true perforated tub, they stayed with the original way of draining even though they did not need to throw water over a tub wall.
Blackstone actually had a solid tub that drained from the bottom when the transmission lifted the agitator during the neutral drain then spun the remaining water in the load over the top of the tub. That's why the tub wall had those criss-cross channels.
Whirlpool had to use the spray rinses to flush off the crap that settled onto the top of the load as the machine sat and drained.
If you have ever watched closely while a machine is spin draining, what is on top of the water quickly falls into the area near the agitator. That is why Speed Queen used a long floatation rinse at the end of the wash to get rid of that stuff. Frigidaire's overflow rinse at the end of the wash was not long enough to get rid of suds and the powerful currents of water coming up the tub walls during agitation actually held the suds on top of the water. With the advent of detergents so that the problem of soap curd was solved, the draining while tumbling of front loaders remains the best way to keep dirt off the laundered items and the heavier than water soil does tend to settle into the outer tub during tumbling.
For many years Maytag did not offer a wash 'n wear cycle with cooldown except on the push button TOL model and while they were early to offer two speed machines, you could not independently set wash and spin speeds until the 806 while other brands offered more flexibility much earlier and further down in the lineup. CU commented in the late 70s or early 80s that while many machines in the group they tested offered infinite water levels, Maytag stuck with set levels. Maytag did finally improve the agitation with the Power Fin agitator, but they were late to increase the machine's capacity and then not by much. The HOH dryers were small capacity dinosaurs into the 70s. All of the refusal to innovate finally caught up with Maytag. I'm not saying they were terrible machines, but for their storied dependability, customers did not get any state of the art features while they were state of the art. As an old service man told John and me, "A Maytag will never do anything to hurt or strain itself." They would wash for those families with stairstep children shown in their ads for lots of years and Maytag was a high-priced brand that many aspired to, but nothing is perfection down here, not even the W1926 and W1986 Mieles, but they come very close.
