Reliability is still an issue, but whether it’s enough of an issue to bother any one particular household just depends on that particular household’s own priorities.
I’m not sure what you’re referring to by the “big crash” but there has been at least one unplanned outage every month for about the last 18 months except for January 2017. And lots and lots of issues that only affected people with certain configurations.
See the following thread ( this is a clickable link)
But there are still many people who are very happy with SmartThings. They’re not happy with the outages, but most of the outages last only a few hours and if you don’t happen to be home during that time you may not even notice. Or you may feel that the flexibility of the system and the ability to add many different kinds of Devices with very complex home automation rules outweighs the occasional glitches.
Every system has pluses and minuses, and systems with a longer MFOP (maintenance free operating period) often get that greater reliability by limiting the number of devices you can add, the number of different types of devices you can add, or the number and complexity of rules that you can set up.
So the first thing to do is to be absolutely honest with yourself about how much maintenance you are willing to do on a system and how many glitches you are OK putting up with. If you want a “set and forget” system, SmartThings probably isn’t the best match for you. If you want a system for a vacation rental cabin that’s 800 miles away, SmartThings certainly won’t be the best system, because many of the glitches will require a hands-on reset of some of the devices. If you want a 24/7 security system, the V2 hub won’t be a good match just because they can and do Push out maintenance updates that take your system off-line, and those updates can be neither refused nor delayed. (But the SmartThings/ADT SECURITY PANEL may still be worth looking at.)
But if you want a hands-on tinkerer’s system that will probably require a couple of hours of maintenance every month, but that will let you do almost any kind of automation you can imagine at a quite low dollar cost, you may be absolutely delighted with what SmartThings can deliver.
Different things work for different people, but start out by doing a thorough and honest evaluation of your own priorities for home automation system, in particular, how much time you’re willing to spend on it every week, how much frustration tolerance you have for a system where something that was working great on Monday Suddenly stops working on Tuesday, and how much money you’re willing to put in. 