I'm trying to decide which LED bulbs to use for a whole house retrofit project. Here, Lowes sells GE, and Home Depot sell EcoSmart.

I find that at most Lowe's stores the inventory is random and sporadic. The GE bulbs are not available in a neutral color temperature of around 3500k. I don't like to use 6500k in a house, but I like a slightly cooler temperature than 2700k for kitchen food prep areas, closets, unfinished basements, etc. From what I've seen the EcoSmart bulbs seem to be a bit less reliable than the GE. The electronics in the base overheat, then the lights flicker for a while and go out.

Have there been any studies unreliability of different brands? Trying to decide where to get them from. Like I know one city that installed LED streetlights and most of them were bad within a couple years or so, and another city used a different brand and has had very few failures after many years.

I feel like LED filament lamps are the future for retrofit lamps, with traditional frosted glass, instead of the type with electronics in the base and a plastic lens.
Thoughts?

Go with Philips or EcoSmart (filament only if you said the "snowcone" type aren't reliable). Both have held up well for me in the past five years  or so. Feit filament bulbs are absolutely terrible. Their "snowcones," on the other hand, are decent.

Yeah, I wish neutral color temperatures, like 3,500K, were available in stores. I guess 3,000K is okay since that's what's available. Th

I like to use 5,000K for outdoors, garages, laundry rooms, etc. For kitchens, bathrooms, and closets, I would choose 3,000K or 4,000K. Everything else should be 2,700K

I find the "snowcone" bulbs to be okay for table lamps, bathroom sconces, and two-lamp ceiling lights. Everything else should be the filament type.

The Philips "basic bulbs" (rated at 10 years), Warm Glow series, and even the Slim Styles are pretty good. I used them throughout my house during the 2016 LED conversion I did. I had a couple "basic bulbs" go EOL after six years, but they were used way more than 3 hours a day everyday, but that's not too bad of a lifespan for their application. Philips products are sold at Kroger owned grocers and Amazon at reasonable prices depending on what you're getting.

I bought several 90+ Lighting bulbs, for fixtures in which the bulb is not visible: 2700K tint, fair price, no visible flickering, very good CRI. It's been the best bulb at a good price I found so far.

These bulbs have the "traditional" led design with a frosted dome and the electronics in the base, but I'm OK with that.

I've been installing some LEDVance/Sylvania & a few GE 3500K and 4000K.  They've done well thus far.  The Sylvania are direct drive so I remove the ballasts. 

I would have to say the simpler bulbs that use a linear regulator or a capacitive dropper. There are more components to fail if you have a bulb with a switching mode power supply, And the bulbs with a switching mode power supply are generally more expensive. The Feit Electric floodlights in our recessed can fixtures in the kitchen use an SMPS, and have been failing a lot because we use them the most. A lot of the time we use them they are dimmed down to about 50%. The TCP made BR floodlights we use in other areas of the house have been more reliable than the Feit Electric ones. I don't know what method the cheaper TCP bulbs use for driving the LEDs, because they are dimmable.

Or it could just be a simple matter of the Feit bulbs being lower quality.

GE or Philips. Both are pretty reliable from my experience. For EcoSmart, Utilitech, and Great Value, you get what you pay for. Cheaper bulbs and shorter life.

Don’t buy the Philips Warm Glow filament LEDs, those have a very high failure rate where the whiter filament fails leaving only the warmer one working. Try to avoid the cheapest non-dimmable Philips LEDs as well. You’re better off getting a cheap EcoSmart or Great Value bulb that’ll last three years than getting a Philips warm glow filament lamp that’ll last one. The warm glow snow cone LEDs, however, are good bulbs. Otherwise Philips is good. GE’s snow cone bulbs are good but their filament ones have a relatively high failure rate. Avoid the “basic” line as well. Every “basic” line LED from even the big name manufacturers is something to avoid.

Haven’t heard much about Utilitech but the older Utilitech Pro line of bulbs was pretty good. Not sure about the newer ones. The EcoSmart snow cone LEDs are junk but I’ve heard good things about the filament lamps from EcoSmart.

Great Value is junk too, and in my expeience those usually flicker badly before they go out. I’ve never had a Great Value LED that simply died in the sense that it stopped working. They usually flicker first, then go out, and then randomly began to work again. I believe the ones I used were made by TCP. I don’t think TCP makes GV LEDs anymore.

Avoid buying cheap products off of Amazon because they can be safety hazards in some cases. Some LED bulbs sold on Amazon aren’t UL listed, so be careful.

 I've had few problems with the EcoSmart bulbs . I have a bunch running D2D for well over 5 years with no failures yet .