Weather it keeps the dirt fluffy or not is not the point , you don.t have to spend a fortune on bags, in My house we used to fill a milele vac bag twice a week. Lots of animals
I have a vacuum shop here in SA and we sell dysons And other makes and are the Dyson accredited service agents for SA. the reason why the cyclones get clogged is that people overfill them. My oldest dyson a dc07 has never once had a clogged cyclone yet I get about3 a week in for just that. customers are lazy they make it so easy to empty the cyclone and yet they still wait till its overloaded.
I worked as a vacuum design engineer and even the company I worked for ( probably the biggest appliance company in the world ) admitted that the dyson was way better than there products.( internally of course)
I have spent most of my life working on designing and testing vacuums and nothing I have ever seen comes close to the all round convenience of a dyson. There are some that clean better but they use bags and those bags loose ther suction after each room you vacuum. So they only clean better in one room if that!
Here in SA like everywere else in the world the people who knock dyson and other bag less vacuums the most are the vacuum repair agents, wonder why , OH YESS thats why they loose revenue from selling bags
Bags are the bread and butter of a vacuum shop , repairs take time new sales are ok but you can make more money off bags in a day than sales of new vacuums there is no trying to sell the customer a vacuum , its just I need bags for a ...... and bam money made. Its good revenue for me too , especially miele bags but I won't bad mouth a machine just because it doesn't use bags , allot of the bagless vacuums out there are pretty alright to aslong as you clean the filters.
Its a trade off but its your choice
washing filters or spending money on bags as far as I am concerned the one is as bad as the other.