No one uses a 'consumer reports' type of site to tell you about how flawless their car is. That's pretty much as you expected.
The very best cars still have 'lemons.' Or, rather, just cars with generally major problems, often with obscure causes.
'Lemon' has kind of come to imply 'unfixable.' But there is almost always a fix, albeit often hard to find. That is, aside from, say, a car with a flawed unibody or something that is otherwise just a major, hard to fix problem, usually resulting from a complete fluke on the assembly line. And if it's not in 'fluke' territory, i.e. they made the same mistake on lots of cars, it becomes the domain of recalls, campaigns, and TSB's.
But large trends are certainly not something to ignore. When there are hundreds, if not thousands, of complaints on a certain vehicle (or engine/trans), it generally means something suffered from a shitty, failure-prone design. It happens to all automakers...though some more than others.