they make diesel anchors

I do a lot of offshore fishing in Costa Rica. All I ever see are suzuki diesels at harbor I use in Flamingo, CR.

Mercury dominates because of the sheer number and market share they have on the industry. That says a lot about the brand.

You would expect that the high hour applications like tow service, law enforcement, CG, water sports, ferry's would bubble up a common brand, but even that is a mixed bag. Around here the water patrol guys seem to repower every couple of years and it is always something different on the transom. My local harbormaster went from Evinrude to Honda, to Merc in the last 5 years.

I think in today's day and age, most manufacturers have figured out how to be "reliable" under most conditions.

With that said, buy Merc.

I did all kinds of research before I bought my small outboard around 15 years ago. I came up with; if you want to go fast, get a mercury. If you want to get home, get a yamaha.

Well I bought a yamaha, and it rotted out from the inside, after using salt away on it after every use. Unit had low hours on it.

I bought a mercury 3 years ago to replace it.

The Verado 350 is a really reliable engine in my experience. We had 2 put on our fire/rescue boat and not one hiccup. I will say the first iteration of the joystick wasn’t the best and thankfully we didn’t have anything like that on the boat but I have had a binnacle go out on me on a whaler that had the joystick and verado setup. The weight over the 300 is the addition of an inner cooler and I think that’s what really lends itself to the reliability of the 350. I think we had over 2 thousand hours on the clock when I retired and she is still going.