Pretty sure Samsung’s business model for SmartThings is just “cool name, and a couple years of good press.” They already got their money’s worth.
As for what the system is, and reliability: I have now had 4 major failures in the last 48 hours, all caused (according to support) by server side issues. A scheduler failure, an official integration failure, a mobile app something that they then fixed failure, and a not-sure-try-reinstalling failure.
I’ve said this before, but let’s try again: home automation is not new. Zigbee and zwave are not “bleeding edge.” SmartThings doesn’t have any patents that I know of. They don’t even make most of their own devices. SmartThings didn’t come close to their kickstarter vision of connecting every device in the home, not that that’s unusual, just saying. I can’t change the TV to the cooking channel and have the bright spots in the kitchen automatically come on.
The only revolutionary aspect of SmartThings is the price. And they now have competition in the same bracket, notably Iris, Wink, and Staples Connect. Plus other legacy alternatives like Insteon, Homeseer, and Vera. Each has pluses and minuses. And now HomeKit and Weave on the horizon.
But looking just at ST: a “hiccup” (Support’s term) on the server side that provided no notification caused my Good morning phrase to fail to fire–forever, unless I reinstall it.
That’s not a “bleeding edge” type of failure. That may be a business model failure of the original SmartThings, in that they can’t afford enough hardware to service the number of accounts they have. The solution may be in the now-delayed version 2 hub, which moves a lot of processing out of the cloud onto the local device.
All I know is if I rely on SmartThings, my lights don’t turn off at night (Jawbone integration failure), don’t turn on in the morning (scheduler failure), and my lock is unpredictable.
As a quad, I just can’t be that vulnerable. I don’t physically have the option to uninstall and reinstall things every day. Even if it’s “just” using the mobile app.
Maybe this is growing pains–but they’re doing the growing, and I’m feeling the pain. 
So I’m taking support’s advice of uninstalling everything from SmartThings. But I’ll only be reinstalling the things I haven’t found a substitute controller for yet.
I’m open to re-visiting SmartThings in the future. Right now, though, I’m not seeing a failure of technology, just of service.
Just my own experience, if it’s working well for you, that’s great.