All this (especially BPRC) is exciting to me, I feel the train community is finally catching up with the times.
I've been running BPRC (battery-powered, remote-control), using RCS/Deltang gear, since May of 2015 and so far have had ZERO failures.
The big issue for us O-scalers is finding the space for a battery large enough to give us the run time we're looking for. I've been using 2000 and 2200 Mah battery packs and getting 2+ hours run time on them. If you don't mind having to recharge them more often, there's no reason a pack with smaller Mah couldn't be used. A smaller Mah (for the most part) means a smaller size pack that would fit in more locos.