Idk, seems like people love hating on smok. People like to bitch in general, especially on the interwebs. If a company puts out too many products/options, they gripe. If a company only makes one mod every year or two, they gripe. Some smok have had issues, plenty haven't. It's pretty obvious though when there was one or two issues of the 510's coming out of stuff like the alien. The interwebs lost their shit. Oh muh god oh muh god, alien's are shit. Apparently they totally forgot that for well over a month every other post was of a wismec 510 coming loose.
I'm not a smok 'fan', I have the alien. Only smok product I've had. Sure the paint is shit, that's a lot of mods. It works fine in wattage mode, tc is non existent. I liked the hand feel of it, the firing bar. Put over 100k puffs on it, used for over 10mo straight daily and it still works. Can't really speak to their subohm tanks, I don't use factory coils. Got tired of that nonsense before subohm tanks were really much of a 'thing' and went straight to rebuildables.
I also don't expect the best from a $40 mod, it is what it is. Mainstream budget range. I've also seen a bunch of tesla wye's autofiring and having other issues, no one bashes tesla. When it happens to tesla it's 'oh well so many are out there, they're so popular there's bound to be a few bad eggs'. When it's smok, it's 'smok sucks'. It's lazy really. I've seen plenty of people post about their dna boards going out and no lie, dna has a better warranty than smok does. Smok's warranty in the u.s. through madvapes is ridiculous, waiting months for replacement. So there's that, however everyone jizzes all over dna. While a good warranty is awesome, shouldn't they not need it so often? Pretty common with the fuses on the boards going out.
Sometimes I think people give a pass to higher end stuff that fails because they have a lot of money tied up in it and they'd rather not think they paid a lot on a lemon unit. 3d printed mods like the boxers with the plastic fading over time. Oh well, it's because of the plastic. Why not call it 'shit'? When paint comes off a smok mod that's the go-to but then something like an alien is $40-50, not $250+.
Also not knocking higher end stuff at all, there's a lot of nice stuff out there. Much of it is machined better, fits better etc. As well it should when it's 4-5x the price. I do see a lot of cases though where more expensive gear gets a free pass from many folks when there's a flaw, malfunction or anything else. Seems ass backwards, you'd think people would expect lower cost lower grade merchandise to be more prone to issues and be more critical of higher end things that should live up to being higher end.