The new law does not allow you to receive national feeds unless you are not served by local stations, i.e. basically in the middle of nowhere.
If you do get good signals by antenna then there's not much need to pay for them on DBS. You do get the guide info and save the pain of having to switch inputs on your TV, etc. In my case I couldn't get good reception, so I'm very happy to have them available.
As far as Boston, as I mentioned earlier, in the case of Dish network, there was some talk about them staying at their current 61.5 satellite. But, the press release implies that that's not true - you can pick them up using a Dish 500. So, I'm not sure about that. Cost is comparable in either case but with 61.5 you'd need to mount two dishes which may or may not be an issue for you.
My guess would be that DTV will be carrying Boston locals on their main (101) satellite, but I haven't seen anything official from them saying that.
If you convert, the dish and LNBs are compatible but the receivers are not. So, you'd need to buy new receivers and might be able to leave your dish alone.
But, most likely, you'll probably want/need a Dish 500, which is a "dual focus" dish, i.e. it uses 2 LNBs and picks up both the 110 and 119 satellites. If you're a new subscriber you can pick up a Dish 500 + receiver + multiswitch for $100-150 online.
As far as dbsdish.com, it may be a bit slanted towards Dish, but not overly so IMO - there are a lot of DTV subscribers/supporters there as well. Certainly, not much "X is better than Y" crap goes on there, the moderators do a good job at keeping things under control.
Personally, I subscribe to both (NHL Center Ice from DTV, everything else from Dish). When I started looking for a system I was going to go with DTV, I hadn't really heard of Dish at all. I ended up going with Dish primarily because they had a better deal at the time ($300 rebate for $49/mo programming for a year). I'm glad I did - I really like the superstations and the Dishplayer. But, I wanted CI, so I picked up an "open box" system cheap ($80) and subscribed to just that. Best of both worlds IMO :) Now that I have my locals I'm even happier I chose Dish. YMMV.
