You may well just wind up getting crappy autos, but mine have been very reliable. You do NOT speak for me when it comes to .22 autopistols.
I was exaggerating a little bit for dramatic effect, but .22 semis on the whole just seem to be more annoying to me.
I've had an SW22A for a few years now, it's relatively reliable as long as it, and its magazines, are perfectly clean and it's decent ammo (CCI SV or better). With bulk pack (of nearly any brand) it can be hit or miss. If you let it get dirty, it will punish you though... and it doesn't take much for it to get to that point. I guess I should probably take it out soon. I haven't fired it in over a year now. Hell, it's probably been 2 years.
My Ruger MKII still jammed once in awhile even with the ammo that it "liked" even after sending it to ruger once (where they basically replaced everything in the gun except for the frame and the barrel). Basically I got bored with the gun and sold it. (It was also getting hard to get .22 LR Blazer at the time, which was the only thing that gun ate with any notional of reliability. )
I was babysitting a Ruger MKIII, it worked OK overall but whenever I shot it I fed it CCI SV, which it seemed to like, we'd still get jams on some bulk stuff, though.
The most rounds I've ever run through a 22 was a Walther P22 a friend of mine had... we ran over 20,000 rounds through that thing before the slide cracked in half. It rarely jammed, but it still did once in awhile. I think the gun has been to S&W twice though. (For the slide cracking in half, and the safety flapping itself on and off in the middle of fire strings).
Some of it is ammo, but I found that on average, if any gun is going to let someone down, it's probably going to be a ..22 semi pistol. It just seems as though if you look at them the wrong way, they start to jam.
The only .22 LR which hasn't annoyed me was the SW617 I had. That thing ran fine even when it was filthy, didn't matter, just kept shooting like a champ. Cleaning it was annoying. I got bored with it and sold it, in retrospect I probably should have kept it.
-Mike