My point is that I worked at a couple of different places that where considering XServer RAID setups, and as part of that I read everything I could find, attend

My point is that I worked at a couple of different places that where considering XServer RAID setups, and as part of that I read everything I could find, attended live presentations of the hardware and talked to people online who where using XServers. And in that process found no reason to write off the hardware of purely software grounds. If you worked extensively with the software and found it a deal breaker, then I'll defer to your experience, but at the time I didn't run into anybody with anything overly bad to say about the software.