I can only give you anecdotal evidence, but hopefully it convinces you that hfs+ is the problem.
I've been using Macs for 5 years now. I've stored time machine backups spanning two drives and OS releases from snow leopard to mavericks. (Each drive was used for about 2.5 years, and the OSes were installed soon after they became available.)
Every 9-15 months, I ask Disk Utility to repair the Time Machine volume. The first time, I lost the entire TM directory and had to format the drive and start over. The second time, it crashed Disk Utility because there were so many errors. The third time, I lost the older ~70% of my backups. The most recent time, the operating system refused to even recognize the disk as an HFS+ volume!
Each time, I had the opportunity to format the disk in question and check it for hardware issues. They all passed badblocks and SMART with flying colors. In addition, the volumes were unmounted properly the vast majority of the time (a few instances of human error and power outage)
tldr: HFS+ loses your data catastrophically even if you use it properly.
On the other side of the anecdotal coin, I've been running OSX for a decade now and have in the neighborhood of 100TB of HFS+ formatted media, some in RAID some as single drives. The few times I've catastrophically lost data/drives its been due to the drives physically failing or, in the case of an SSD, a firmware bug. I've lost data to the filesystem (bitrot) but that wouldn't really be prevented by any other FS, they'd just tell me sooner.
By the same token, I've experienced much more corruption on my ZFS (~200TB) and btrfs (58TB) arrays over the last few years than I have on HFS for a decade.
I've seen similar and noticed drives used for TM tend to fail more than other HFS+ formatted drives. One of my hunches is that SMART is not to be trusted and the repeated spin-up, do stuff, spin down of TM on those drives is the cause. The other is that rarely you will in fact get a garbled data packet over USB where the CRC happens to match.
But when I test the drives with badblocks, nothing shows up. The hardware is fine -- I write bytes and it gives them back to me when I read.
I suspect it's because Time Machine works by creating tons and tons of symlinks, which the HFS+ driver does not like. Regardless, it shouldn't be possible for a userspace application to corrupt the hard drive by creating a lot of links and folders.
I've been using Macs for 5 years now. I've stored time machine backups spanning two drives and OS releases from snow leopard to mavericks. (Each drive was used for about 2.5 years, and the OSes were installed soon after they became available.)
Every 9-15 months, I ask Disk Utility to repair the Time Machine volume. The first time, I lost the entire TM directory and had to format the drive and start over. The second time, it crashed Disk Utility because there were so many errors. The third time, I lost the older ~70% of my backups. The most recent time, the operating system refused to even recognize the disk as an HFS+ volume!
Each time, I had the opportunity to format the disk in question and check it for hardware issues. They all passed badblocks and SMART with flying colors. In addition, the volumes were unmounted properly the vast majority of the time (a few instances of human error and power outage)
tldr: HFS+ loses your data catastrophically even if you use it properly.