Sparkfun itself is somewhat new to all of this as well, the facet was our first fully-enclosed RTK unit with an integrated antenna (AKA the first mostly Plug-and-play device we offered, release date was a bit under 3 years ago)
One of the problems with the designs that preceded it (surveyor, express, express plus) were the SMA connector’s robustness…it would work fine for stationary applications but fail under vibratory stresses…and products that do use SMA now have a much more solid SMA situation.
It’s been a learning process on our end, design-wise
As for customer service turnaround time, you are probably on-point…we have a standard 3-day turnaround for tickets, which probably doesn’t suit a full time operation’s strict needs…but we do our best! Other options often include service contracts and the like (which we currently do not offer)