I never noticed overlap issues on the locals on Dish. The channels that experience the issue the most, for me, usually come from Viacom. The only time locals ran over were when pushed for Major News breaks, or sports events.
For instance, on the "history" channel, after 10pm shows run an hour and one minute. Then they start bumping the start and end time by a minute here and there until about 2 or 3 am when they are three minutes off.
Say the "Idiots chewing on Logs" runs from 2:02am until 3:03.. Etc...
But even in primetime shows will end 3-5 seconds after the hour on many channels. You have to extend the recording to catch all of it but that prevents you from starting a recording on a different channel right away.
Science Channel - "Bigfoot marries Mermaid Megaladon Shark" runs from 7pm to 8:00:05 so you have to extend the record time by 1 minute to catch those few seconds.
BUT, on TLC you have "Goobers Licking Steering Wheels" runs precisely at 8:00:00
If you try to use the automatic timer setups it just won't record "Goobers Licking Steering Wheels" at 8:00:00 because it is still recording "Bigfoot marries Mermaid Megaladon Shark" until 8:01:00
So it will tell you that it can't record and will try to reschedule it for the next occurrence which may be later in the night, if you are lucky.
I've dealt with it but it is annoying. Now this won't be an issue anymore. It will mean that I'll have to go between two machines to program it all but I'll deal with that too.
It's in no way the fault of the DVR and I doubt Dish has much to do with it though I'm sure they could trim the commercials down a little so that shows start and stop precisely at the top of the hour, as they should.
I am certain that it's just a crappy trick by the networks to keep you from DVR'ing other channels or to keep you on their channel rather than switching.
Or maybe they just do it to be jerks. But I think it's to keep you tuned to them.