Time machine unable to restore

After weeks of coping with a 1 1/2 year old hard drive (too soon!) crash, I've decided to do a complete re-install of Mac OS (upgraded from Mt Lion to Mav).
I have two Western Digital My Book Essential external hard drives I back up to. One at work, one at home. I originally formatted them to mac journaled, Case-sensitive, then backed up with Time Machine.
All backups show clearly through Finder.
Post HD crash, I tried to restore via time machine, as well as via migration assistant to my most recent point. The only point that would work was a one year old back-up. After painfully trying everything, I just decided to use this older back up point, and then pull all my newest data (docs, photos, music, etc) over to the old folder.
After a week or so, I just decided to wipe my HD, and upgrade to Mavericks, format my external HDs to non-case sesitive, so just mac journaled format to see if I could get a working system with backed up data.
After testing out my new OS with newly created TM backup, I still can not restore to a previous point.
Perhaps this has to do with my Western Digital HDs? I don't know.
But it is ridiculous!!! There is no reason to use time machine if it does not work. I think mac products are sort of nice, but I've lost all faith in them. I'm no longer going to pay a premium price for a system that is not functional.
If anyone has a fix, would be grateful for your advice.

An update. I never resolved this issue, having gone to the apple store and extensively explained and provide examples of my issue. They said they would refer my issue to their software engineers, but I never heard anything. I was able to dig into my backed up folders and retrieve important data, but I was not able to restore to a previous backup.
I did purchase carbon copy cloner and have stopped using time machine.
Next laptop I buy will likely not be an apple.

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