Most of the people who don't like it because of the programming, have never used one, You don't have to do any programming unless you want to. The Reef Angel comes with a pre-installed program that includes all the common functions and you can use the wizard to create custom software that will do almost anything you can dream up. You have to be pretty creative to come up with something that would require you to do much coding yourself and once you get to that point, you are probably beyond the abilities of any other controller.Mainly I think people don't like it because of the programing.