Apple TV flawed - lost HD movie rentals after factory restore

I had 2 HD movie rentals downloaded and stored on my Apple TV. This evening when we went to watch one of them, every time I chose the Movie Rentals menu it would take me to the screen that shows my rented movies (and how many days remaining to view them) but I could not select either of them. This was shortly followed by the Apple logo on a black screen, and after a few minutes it would bring up the main menu.
I restarted the Apple TV a few times, but the result was the same each time.
I could not move the movies to my Mac because HD movies cannot be transferred.
My only option? I did a factory restore. I then went to the Downloads option in the Settings menu, expecting it to begin downloading the movies again (and wasting a huge chunk of my monthly bandwidth allowance), only to discover that nothing happened.
Why have Apple designed the Apple TV to 1) force HD movies to stay on the Apple TV with no way to backup 2) no way of retaining rented movies if a Factory Restore is required 3) no way of downloading the movies again (potentially at great expense - additional bandwidth beyond my standard allowance is quite expensive).
Has anyone else had this problem? Has Apple's annoyingly temperamental Apple TV not only wasted my time and my bandwidth, but also my money?

Thanks for the replies.
Of course I knew that a Factory Restore would wipe everything - but having already run a 'diagnostics' (which found no problems), tried restarting the Apple TV, I couldn't see any other way of getting it working again (I've also had regular problems with having no image on screen when waking the Apple TV, so I was overdue trying a Factory Restore to see if it would fix it).
Of course, if I was going to erase and restore my OS X intallation I would make backups - but this isn't an option with the Apple TV's movie rentals - especially HD movies as they cannot be transferred to any other device.
I did however assume that Apple would have some mechanism in place to keep track of things - eg. movie downloaded - yes, movie watched - no, movie deleted - no, movie present - no =>action - allow user to download again.
Perhaps they could even allow some form of 'hidden' sync with your iTunes library - where even if for some reason they don't want you to watch the movie on your computer, that it could store an encrypted backup, so that in the even of an Apple TV factory restore, the content could then be transferred across back to the Apple TV with the first sync.
I've logged into my iTunes account an 'reported a problem'. Unfortunately it's been a couple of hours and I've had no reply (if they're not going to allow these problems to be overcome automatically, they should be quicker with their response). Also, of the 2 movies that were on my Apple TV, one was downloaded 2 days ago, and the other about 2 weeks ago, and only the most recent had the option of 'report a problem'.
Obviously a situation like mine is uncommon - but they really should clean up all the rough edges with the Apple TV to avoid these problems.

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