Let's just agree to disagree.
We could both argue til we're blue in the face and probably never agree. You may have had good experiences with Traxxas and bad experiences with Novak. Personally, I've had the opposite. Yeah, yeah, I know Traxxas has great CS...the point is that I don't want to have to talk to their CS dept in the first place.
As for the SD XR, mine has worked flawlessly for the 2 or 3 years I've owned it. It started out in my crawler, then replaced the esc in my E-savage, then replaced the EVX-2 that wouldn't run on 14 cells until the voltage was drained down to 16.8v. It really pissed me off that I had just dropped almost $400 on this truck and when I plug in my 7-cell packs it won't go.
I won't even get into my VXL issues.