And yet if manufacturers cared enough about UX it wouldn't take much for input failures to be subconsciously correctable again. All you need is some kind of immediate feedback - an arrow appearing on-screen for each button press, for instance (or a beep - but I'd be the first to turn that off, so for the love of all that is holy, don't make it always-on!).

What's crucial, though, is that mistakes or overshoots can be (a) detected (for example, if three presses were detected, show three arrows) and (b) corrected without having to wait for the channel change to complete.