Keep in mind that low latency is a different goal than reliability. If you want the lowest-latency, the anycast address of a big company will often win out, because they've spent a couple million to get those numbers. If you want most reliable, then the closest hop to you should be the most reliable (there's no accounting for poor sysadmin'ing), which is often the ISP, but sometimes not.
If you run your own recursive DNS server (I keep forgetting to use the right term) on a local network, you can hit the root servers directly, which makes that the most reliable possible DNS resolver. Yes you might get more cache misses initially but I highly doubt you'd notice. (note: querying the root nameservers is bad netiquette; you should always cache queries to them for at least 5 minutes, and always use DNS resolvers to cache locally)
> If you want most reliable, then the closest hop to you should be the most reliable (there's no accounting for poor sysadmin'ing), which is often the ISP, but sometimes not.
I'd argue that accounting for poorly managed ISP resolvers is a critical part of reasoning about reliability.
If you run your own recursive DNS server (I keep forgetting to use the right term) on a local network, you can hit the root servers directly, which makes that the most reliable possible DNS resolver. Yes you might get more cache misses initially but I highly doubt you'd notice. (note: querying the root nameservers is bad netiquette; you should always cache queries to them for at least 5 minutes, and always use DNS resolvers to cache locally)