cable is slower than dish? What are you talking about upper? The programming is virtually the same. Not following you there. I just preferred Dish over Direct because of how the receivers functioned, and they seemed to have better PPV selection, but they both have on demand now I think. So Caps is correct whatever floats your boat as far as a package. I think I liked dish's packages better too. From what it looked like you could get with the different packages.
If you have a stable place to mount the dish and it is not a hurricane coming through, it really is not as bad as it is made out to be as far as loosing signal. the key is having it mounted on a stable area of the house.