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If I can veer away from the issue of reliability and comment on the "impact," although I didn't arrive until a decade after color TV did, I remember asking as a kid about those early days of color and the very negative comments made about "green skin" and ISTR that either "terrible" or even "horrible" was the adjective which summed up an impression which was then about twenty years past.
This conversation was at a time when an aquaintance of my grandparents' still refused to buy a color TV, such was the impression left by early demonstrations.
On the other hand, I recall reading an article by critic John Crosby (not an easy man to please) which was published in one of the major magazines in January, 1955 in which he stated almost incidentally to the rest of the piece: "color television is already here and it is technically magnificent." There's no telling which set he was watching, though I guess going purely by the odds it was probably a CT-100. And he would be one who could afford--and would demand--meticulous setup of his receiver in every way with many, many more times the attention to every detail from antenna lead-in to convergence than would be given to the average set on the showroom floor.
So while beautiful living color was of course promised, and under the best circumstances was probably enjoyed, color TV's very slow acceptance can probably be attributed to its lack of impact upon many due to underwhelming results seen in many early demonstrations.
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