The Sierra Nevada Mountains (and other places where bear canisters are required) are not littered with missing canisters.
They are a tested and proven technology. Are they perfect? No. But I don't see how using a bear canister is going to make your food MORE prone to disappearing than using a food sack.
And yeah, you don't want to hang a canister... but again, you don't see that being an issue in places where bear canisters are mandatory.
About the only problem I've heard with canisters is the occasional campsite near a cliff that the bear has access to both the top and bottom of the cliff. In these cases, the bears occasionally learn that if the cliff is high enough, rolling the canister off the cliff will cause it to bust open under it's own weight. But the locations this sort of thing happens is limited and the community finds ways to deal with it (issues warnings, finds alternate locations, or installing bear boxes at the troubled site).