I did a bit of research yesterday and concluded that unless you pay €€€€ for a pillar drill you get rubbish. So what else is new?
Most tellingly, there are two kinds of transmission, 2-pulley and 3-pulley. The cheap models have two conical pulleys and you're meant to shift the belt up & down to change speed, keeping it horizontal, otherwise it wears out prematurely. 3-pulley machines have an intermediate pulley and two belts: you can get many more speeds and the belts alway stay horizontal. The cheap pulleys are likely plastic, too, vs. steel in the decent kit.
Most of them now have self-tightening chucks, which are a bastard to get drills out of after a heavy job. I haven't yet got arthritis in my hands but I do have tendons and things that go click and hurt (arthritis after all, maybe?), and I want a nice big chuck key, ta very much.
On some of them (e.g. Scheppach) the tilting table is so constructed that you can't get a spanner or a socket onto the hex-head bolt that secures it.
On none of the models I looked at will the table tilt towards the user, so that if you have a series of slanting holes to drill in a wide piece you're screwed. You get a single axis only, perpendicular to the column. Maybe the higher-end models allow 2 axes, but my wallet starts to whimper when I look at them.
That's about it. I'll stick with my old Bosch/GDR model and use jigs.