It sounds like your event was probably not an ideal fit for Eventbrite. Eventbrite is great for a lot of events, especially events with fewer price points. A couple specific comments:
I found that the system didn't meet my reporting needs very well. For example, I couldn't use it to track offline payments - when receiving a faxed order, I entered it manually, but there was no option to mark the order as "pay by cheque - unpaid". I wanted to later mark the order as "pay by cheque - paid" as the cheque came in.
You can do this when someone registers online with a pay by check/at door/via invoice option. It is odd that you can't do that through the back-end adds, but you could always just use the front-end registration interface to add your paper registrations and then you can mark fees as paid later.
Another issue, is inflexibility in ticket types. You have to create a ticket for each day/combination of days at the conference. When trying to make Excel formulas to determine attendance, it becomes complex to know who is going to be there on what day. And to end an early bird sale, you have to manually hide one set of tickets and unhide another. I ended up with 18 ticket types in total which is a lot of work.
A multi-day conference where registration is available in different packages for different days is definitely a tough event to manage with Eventbrite. If that's the primary type of event that an org runs, then Eventbrite is probably not the right solution.
As far as Early Bird or other sales go, you can set start and end dates for sales on any ticket type. So you can offer an Early Bird ticket type to end on a certain date and then a Regular Advance ticket type to start in that date. However, all ticket types show on the registration page (even those you can't buy yet/anymore) and if you want to
only show Early Bird tix during the early sales period, or hide early bird options once that sales period is over, then you have to do the hide/unhide thing. This is a frequently-requested feature that I suspect will come along pretty soon.
Printing badges was also a lot of work. There are many steps involved in getting the data into Avery.
It does a CSV export of all attendees, which is supported by Word, Avery and many other mail-merge type applications. What additional steps did you have to take? Were they particular to the complexity of your event?
Then I discovered something very disturbing. Their forums were programmed to replace "cvent" with "bent". It so happens that cvent.com is one of their competitors. Don't ask what bent.com is - it's not work friendly.
After this experience, I can't recommend them - theoretically, they are still ok if they work for your event - but the implication of dishonesty in censoring their forums is not something I can support.
I was really concerned when I read this particular section of your post. I had run into the competitor word filter once (RegOnline became vegonline), but in that case I mostly thought it was funny. But clearly it was not for you, and it was confusing for me, a pretty experienced web forum user.
I contacted Eventbrite and pointed them to this post. They told me that they have had problems with spammers and posting robots, and that was why they implemented the filters, not ever intending to censor legitimate posters. They acknowledged that it can definitely be confusing for users, and have removed the filters. All this happened within a few business hours - I have always found them to be very responsive.
It sounds like CiviCRM, with its more robust membership and event support, will be better for your organization in the long run. For our own part, we are trying to figure out whether Eventbrite will work over the long term as we want to better track individual and organization participation in our events over time, in our own CRM database. But for simple, or even somewhat complex event registration, Eventbrite is pretty excellent.