Agreed - and trust me on 2 things...
1. I'd willingly pay for a working service, it's far more secure to NOT run bitcoind locally on our servers - this 3rd party approach is ideal in our industry.
and
2. API users are clearly getting nothing in terms of support from one of the leaders in the Bitcoin industry so yea, we are getting nothing for paying nothing, but it's really kind of pathetic to open a ticket every few days just to have it closed saying "API is getting DDOS'ed". Why doesn't BlockChain.info just say they aren't supporting their API?
That said, I'll check out blockr.io!
Blockchain.info API service is free so actually you're getting what you pay for. A good alterntive is blockr API at
http://btc.blockr.io/documentation/apior, you can use bitcoin API and build your own bitcoind server