I'm not keen on soaps either, they trash my skin completely, but I'm not particularly smell either so dont seem to have much problem. I use the little wall smellies because our flat has a slight (inherent, unfixable) damp problem and gets a bit musty from time to time, and if you cook fish or a particularly strong smelling meal it's not always cleared by just opening the windows.
Failure mode of the heated ones – only thing I can see is if the heating coils shorted internally but the coils are set in a non-conducting resin and can't contact each other, and if they did they'd go bang fairly quickly (seconds), but then they'd blow a fuse fairly rapidly and not set themselves on fire anyway. I've thought about this a lot and really struggled to see any circumstances where this might happen. Under normal operation they get to about 35 degrees C.
I don't get peoples complete dislike of them either, seems like a very small thing to get upset over (unless it gives you asthma of course!)
Everyone's about scare mongering and worrying over the slightest possible cause of the slightest possible minor irritation these days. As said above, they'd have been black flagged and spread across the news if more than a couple had failed and been *proven* to have caused house fires.