That's the problem with Google. When there's a universal frustration shared by many people, there becomes such a glut of complaint sites and forums and "troubleshooting guides" out there, that what you're actually looking for, if it exists, ends up completely buried.

We're on year 9 of our 9-foot pre-lit tree. It's been delightful. The lights required a bit of tlc year 7, and last year it took enough tlc that we decided to retire the strands, pull them of the tree, and just manually string new lights the next season (this year). We bear the company no ill will, and recognize that 8 years of use (rough calculations put that around 5,000 lights-on hours), coupled with the degradation of the plastic light housings etc when subjected to the hot and cold cycles of 8 years in un-climate-controlled storage and the stress on the wires of being crushed up with the folded tree chunks will cause the strands to wear out.

It occurs to me, however, that I could be smart about this, and instead of just using a bunch of regular all-in-a-line light strands, I could see if there were any establishments out in the great interwebs that marketed strands like the ones on pre-lit trees, specifically FOR lighting trees.

It's actually a good idea, really. In essence, these tree-specific strands of lights are like those horrifying icicle stands, but there are only 6 "icicles", and each one is about a dozen lights and is ~10ft long, so that you use one icicle per branch, so from plug to plug, it's only a couple feet long, and that part runs up the trunk.

Anybody ever seen strands out there like that? I'd be willing to spend a a few bucks more per strand because of how much easier it'll make stringing and unstringing.