I've done a bit of experimenting ...
So far, the 'door splodge' hasn't reoccured.
I'm placing them right at the very back of the drum, under the clothes.
I think the problem is that the water doesn't actually enter the drum from the bottom during the fill - it's coming in via the jets at the front, so being at the bottom of the load doesn't really mean it's going to get wet first.
The Miele load-detection also doesn't involve full tumbles, it's more like a slight twitching of the drum followed by filling through the flume i.e. water pours in over the glass so the clothes immediately start to get wet. Then it starts the detergent dispensing phase which is where it fills through the drawer the 'traditional' way - detergent's never dispensed through the water flume.
It tumbles for a while until it's happy that things are saturating then creates a 'tunnel' in the laundry with a distribution spin and starts a pretty serious flow of water through the jet absolutely saturating them.
What seems to happen is the water is pumped into the honeycomb drum faster than it can drain away during normal tumbling so you end up with loads of water in the wash rather than down in the sump.
The wash action on cottons is pretty vigorous. I've never seen a non-commercial machine wash like this before! The idea seems to be to create a layer of water in the drum on the honeycomb pattern to protect the clothes and then absolutely slosh them around the place.
It's something like this:
Fast tumbles that slow down as they progress for a while and then very fast tumbles where water sloshes around and even down the door glass from all directions with the recirculation jet sloshing water in.
The jet's at least as powerful as a washing machine emptying down the drain. It produces a lot of water compared to what I've seen on the Zanussi / AEG / Electrolux systems but the basic design of it is very similar.
I suppose the best approach might be a 'sacrificial sock' to make the pod more substantial.
The boot design on this generation of Mieles is pretty tight too. There's very little chance of anything actually jamming in the seal and there's a very tight space between the drum and the seal, so I don't think there's much risk of any objects ever making their way between the drum and the stainless steal outer tub.
You should see the high rinse level action!!
The machine fills quite deep, operates the jet and uses a lot of very aggressive tumbles to really get things flying around!
The design is all about forcing as much water as possible through the fabric without damaging it.
It doesn't seem to damage anything though, the design of the drum seems to ensure they're mostly interacting with water, not the drum surfaces (which are very smooth and entirely metal.. no plastic scoops or anything like that)
What's really impressed me is that thing like antiperspirant stains in t-shirts that had been there for a long time (Despite washing on long cotton cycles in the Samsung) disappeared in a 60 min short cottons cycle with exactly the same detergent.
