At the most basic level, selection of any component/system comes down to three things: Requirements, Execution, Reliability.
As it happens, I'm employed as an engineer by the most celebrated aviation design house on the planet (no, it's not Van's), and I have some significant experience with system requirements definition and downselect. I have spent the last 20 years in a world of military specifications, bleeding edge manufacturing, and strict configuration control. My standards for quality are biased by this experience. That said, EVERYBODY in the EA-B world comes up short of what I take for granted as "normal". There's good reason for this, of course. Nobody but the US govenment needs to meet the requirements for combat. And none of us wants to pay $100,000 for a fuel injection system. So the good side of this is manufacterers are free to offer parts that are "good enough", and bypass the significant cost of strict configuration control. The problem with this is that anybody with an idea can become a vendor to us, and "good enough" is too often taken at face value by the offeror. As the E-AB experience moves from "home-building" to "home-assembling", I'm seeing a lot of products offered to us. These range from clever to downright scary, and my reasonably trained eye has shown me enough that I have learned to take ANY unsubstantiated vendor claims with a grain of salt.
The bottom line is that as the consumer in the E-AB market, you are completely responsible for your decision. YOU must define your requirements; don't let a slick sales pitch sway you. YOU must evaluate the technical execution to your satisfaction. If multiple vendors offer the same feature, how and why are they different in execution? If you don't understand the significance of the differences, bring a friend along who's qualified to make that evaluation. Believe me, details matter. And finally, YOU are responsible for the reliability of your aircraft. We don't have MTBF data readily at hand like in the Mil-Spec world, and we CERTAINLY can't trust the sales pitch/promises of the vendor, so we are left with track record and peer reviews. Track record is pretty easy to come by (how many cumulative hours flown by unit X), but equally important is the vendor's willingness to engage in a technical interchange in public. Unlike my professional world, national security considerations are not at play - "Open Kimono" should be the order of the day around here.
