I realize I sound a bit harsh towards smartrise. To be fair they do run, most of them I'm not at fixing each week , but they do have far more issues than most of the rest of the controls on my route. However most of what said is well deserved I think by their not so smart engineering and design decisions.

And I do like the debug screen you can place calls with real quick and can see where the car is/car speed. It's not all bad. But I don't think the couple nice bells and whistles with smartrise are enough to outweigh the negative.

Does anyone else have fun with their force guided relays for sf1 and sf2 that like to burn up contacts? That you have to order from smartrise...

When I work with the sales folks in my office to get quotes out, anything critical or important I'm always sure to spec a MCE ibox or va controls mh3000.

Yep, those two relays fail all the time! You can see spark inside them when the contactors pick or releases. Definitely a design issue.
No need to mention all the 120volt inputs. They also fail all the time causing to get redundancy error, which requires changing the main board and re-learning the shaft which is a pain. I hate seeing “syncing” message and all the delays for doing a simple task. it seems like they also know about all these issues and instead of solving the problem they have chosen to increase the warranty period to 5 years! I am not a fan of that.
I agree with you about Virginia Controls and MCE. Those are my favorite controllers too.

I don't like them for 2 major reasons.

1st is software. IF you have software issues getting it resolved can be difficult and time consuming. However, when corrected it will most likely be good until you do something like Door Lock Monitoring and smartrise never updated the files, so you need to start all over with the "bugs" in the software.

2nd tech support. They are the worst for tech support. I filed a complaint with the BBB because they told me if you don't buy "X" amount of controllers from them a year you get moved to the back of the que. Waiting hours for the "call back" that normally comes super late in NYC like 7pm. This results in overtime charges for the customer and many hours of useless billing for the customer. Tech support just reads from a screen and have little knowledge of elevators so sooner or later they will tell you "We need a senior tech" and now you go back into the que waiting hours (again) for a call back. I now record the conversations with the Tech Support and make them send an email to keep a paper trail. If anyone wants to see the weeks of emails for this project we have in NY where the problem was software and they couldn't figure it out for literally 2 weeks (10 days half that was waiting for call backs) at what point they sent us new software but was never updated with all the changes made for floor lock outs, floors taken out of service, parking, PI changes. I sent them the job download and they still couldn't update.

My preference is MCE or ESI. If you call tech support, they are calling you back within an hour (usually). The prints have 90% of the information needed to fix almost all the elevators but yes sometimes you need to call tech support. Both of these companies have the software down to a science, so you don't need to worry about that. I also like them because they are more mechanical with relays and are safer.

This is my opinion.

I've heard they are going out of business. Not sure how true it is, but its not surprising with so many bad reviews and terrible products and services.