I think with Tenere is like with buying Chinese product... if you lucky it will be as good as a decent brand overpaid product, but if you unlucky enough you will end up like me... And in reply to those lessons of riding big singles - i'm riding bikes for 21 years now, and amongst my bikes i had some of them : DR600, DR650, XT600, DRZ400, F650GS Dakar, and Tenere... Some of them for more then 3 years. None of them had such bad engine failure as Tenere despite being even over 10 years old.
Modern products are struggling for quality and reliability from simple reasons - constant reductions of production costs. Programs run in factories like CIP (continuous improvement process), VPS (value added production system) and similar are basically concentrating on earning more money for the company and spending less. Many times cheaper parts are fitted because of this. They won't fail every time, but will have higher fail rate... I just was unlucky enough to have a bike falling in this fail rate percentage. I wont present you with bar chart or pie chart showing fail rates, but one thing i know - 5 years old bike with 12000 miles on the clock shouldn't blow in to pieces doesn't matter how low revs you fancy riding. And i wasn't riding my bike with low revs, simply because to make this bike go you need to twist your wrist, lets face the true :-)
I wouldn't recommend Tenere to anybody now. Stories about 100 000 kilometers doesn't mean much for me when my bike is in bits in my garage.

There is such clever saying in my country - Fed person will never understand a hungry one. :-)