Gaming
needs to do now is to create a more realistic test. Using static elements for maybe 6 hours at a time every day
That's kinda useless. You might as well just wait for the user reports at that point.
These unrealistic torture tests accelerate the potential burn-in, and it's still useful to gauge how long it could really take.
You'll definitely have users gaming on the thing for 8+ hours every day, so I don't see much value in that. Like I said, you might as well just wait for users to report their experiences.
Not everyone is going to hop onto the internet to publicly report their issues.
But enough people are. People are talking about every small thing they did, what happened, whatever.
Also, with all the different plugins or stats available on this thing to track everything, you can probably create a pretty detailed breakdown of what someone did with their Steam Deck.