Honestly, can't say that car dealerships are that different brand to brand. Variation is probably more closely tied to the owners of the dealership than the overall brand. You definitely see more "service" in luxury brands, but I found two dealerships to be quite pleasant and two other dealerships to be the opposite.
When I was searching, I was looking for an unmodified car, and one dealership assured me that their car was stock. I test drove the car and it definitely had an aftermarket exhaust. I tell the guy this and he adamantly says it's stock. He gives me a receipt for the parts they replaced, and I asked why they replaced the MAF and he said that the old car ran without them.... Right. I told him that I'd have to go even lower on the price because it was modified and had some damage on carfax and he was like, yeah no way. I told him I had another offer that was good enough for me to buy, just wanted to see if they had something better, he told me to go buy it. I did, lol. He calls back a month later and asks if I'm still interested...
The point is, I don't think you can really fault Nissan for a crappy dealer. Ford has crappy dealers (I had to push a car back because it ran out of gas....). An audi dealer we went to didn't know the difference between an A4, an S4, or an RS4...
As for prices, I think it's just that dealership again. The place I bought my car from had the car for 3 months because nobody wanted it at that high of a price (they had it initially listed for 29k or something w/ 20k on the clock). Really clean car, but nobody wants an overpriced used car. So you just gotta wait them out and/or find dealers that are getting desperate with the cars that just sit there on the lot as it just loses them money.
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