Every system has pluses and minuses, so it really depends on your own needs and interests. Smartthings is extremely versatile and flexible, which is a big plus, and as you noted has a very active developer community. However, there are some reliability issues and it is a cloud-based platform. Although you can write some custom code for it you’re not buying a CPU that you can upload your own libraries onto and some fairly basic features like telnet and UDP are not available. So as long as you understand what the architecture is, a lot of people really like it.
No mention yet of a GEN three, but the Nvidia shield gaming console/streaming box has been announced as having SmartThings capability, maybe in just a couple months. That could be a cool option, we just don’t know yet exactly how it will work.
As far as V1 versus V2 of the hub, V2 allows for a very small amount of local processing (just the official smart lights feature, and only with some devices), has somewhat better video integration, and they’ve already announced that they won’t be adding new features to the V1 anymore, but there are a lot of people still using it.
As far as more resources, this might be of interest: