Just because one repair guy didn't know what he was doing, that isn't an indictment of the RCMC design. When the board dies, it's prudent to look for the cause and not just drop another board in. Anyone that keeps putting boards into a failing locomotive without locating the root cause IMO is not a repair man, he's a parts changer. Obviously, this was not a failure of the RCMC, but rather of the person doing the "repair", though I cringe to call it a repair!
Yes, perhaps the RCMC has weak points, but so do the previous designs. One Achilles' heel of the RCMC is if you have a total motor short, the motor overload detection circuit may not react in time to save the motor driver FETs. Couple that with the lousy Canon motors that Lionel has started to use in Legacy steam, and you have a recipe for killing the board. However, the same issue would also kill the previous DCDS motor driver, so that's not that surprising, it's not that easy to detect in time.
