Morning
It's worth remembering that the defender was designed for a purpose, one that it excelled at, i.e. farmers in the UK wanting something they could chuck crap in to and drive around fields without worrying about it, towing trailers and driving through mud and across rough terrain, it does all those things really well. The fact that they have become desirable to a wider demographic means that LR have responded by giving people what they want but it's impossible to get away from the fact that they were never designed to be more than a utility vehicle. They were built of cheap off the shelf parts so could be fixed easily and quickly by a farmer with a hammer and had lots of helpful design features like letting you know when it needed more oil by no longer leaking!
I worked for LR as an apprentice many years ago and have owned lots but I don't expect them to do anything more than what they were designed for, having relied on vehicles everywhere from Iraq to Afghanistan to Darfur, the only vehicle I would buy for reliability in dodgy conditions is a Land Cruiser 70 series but unavailable in a lot of places, if I want to drive on the road I'd have a Discovery if I wanted a LR or a Land Cruiser 100/200 series or something like that. If I want something to play around with, drive in stupid places, tinker with at the weekends then I'd buy an older LR and treat it as a toy, they are just different vehicles.
All good fun!
Mat