What should I do when the intermittent black screen or loss of video Quality Program has ended?

You have the MacBookPro6,2—the Edsel of Macs. It may have the logic-board defect that was covered by a recall program that has now ended.

Residents of the EU may be entitled to warranty service for up to six years after purchase.

Make a "Genius" appointment at an Apple Store, or go to another authorized service provider, to have the machine tested. The routine hardware diagnostics used by service providers do not detect the fault. There is a specific test for this issue that Apple calls "VST" (for "Video Switching Test.") Ask for it. A "Failed" result means that the fault is present.

You may be quoted a price of about $300 (in the U.S.) for a "depot repair," which involves shipping the unit to a central repair facility and takes about two weeks. For that flat fee, anything found wrong with it should be fixed, not just the logic board.

Sometimes the replacement part is also defective, so be prepared for that possibility. If you decide to pay for a new logic board, test thoroughly during the 90-day warranty period on the repair. Some owners have reported that they went through as many as three replacement boards before getting one that worked.

If you don't want to pay for the repair, you may (or may not) be able to work around the problem by disabling automatic graphics switching. To use the discrete graphics processor, you'll need a third-party utility to switch to it manually.

Often the problems start after an OS upgrade. If the upgrade was recent, and you have backups, then you can revert to a previous OS X version.

I Have to disagree with your analogy about the 2010 MBP I bought mine brand new and it's been a fantastic machine for me. That being said, After four plus years I am standing in line with other owners, the GPU did go out for me. After debating back and forth on whether its a hardware or software issue, I've come to the conclusion that there may have been some lines of code in each new iteration of OS that prevented the GPU from from crashing. A few lines of code that are no longer in Yosemite. Since the release, I've seen more and more 2010 MBP owners online speaking up about that exact same problems. My MBP is currently getting a new logic board installed and I will most likely install the above mentioned software as extra insurance.

The only regret that I have is no Bluetooth LE, but I can still get phone calls through my Mac, so I'm happy enough.

The problem started with Mavericks (naturally after the 3 years lapsed) and became frequent with upgrade to Yosemite. Since then I've tried going back to 10.6 with a clean install but the problem now surprisingly exists in the ancient version too.

The backups do not help. I've tried the clean installs of all of all the way back to 10.6. It now occurs in the old os as well.

Linc points out: "Sometimes the replacement part is also defective, so be prepared for that possibility. If you decide to pay for a new logic board, test thoroughly during the 90-day warranty period on the repair. Some owners have reported that they went through as many as three replacement boards before getting one that worked."

I've found this to be true for as long as I've worked on Macs, which I started doing in 1985. Apparently, to save money, Apple doesn't go through their old stock to weed out potentially bad parts, even if they have production run or serial number ranges indicating a likely bad batch, and uses them in repairs instead, hoping for the best. This seems to be how Apple shakes out the bad parts from their stock--if the repair shop or the user eventually reports that the repair part failed, they just keep sending out more parts, without checking the part before it ships, to see if it's from a bad batch.

I should add here (since Apple Discussions won't let you edit a post after several minutes) that if Apple gives you three bad boards in a row, that often they'll then give you a new Mac.