For discussion's sake regarding the reliability issues; how many miles has each one of you put on your supercharger kits to get a clearer picture?
I mean if someone hasn't had any issues but say has only clocked 5k miles on their kit is a different thing than someone who had 5 issues but has done 50k miles on their kit.
As for another issue:
Personally I wouldn't buy a kit where you don't have confidence in the support the manufacturer gives. Because chances are high you will need it. A certain part might have a difficult fit, or you even get the wrong part (without knowing its the wrong part, that isnt always clear). At that point you want to call them, and you want to speak to someone on the phone that has good knowledge of the product and wants to invest time to help you.
I consider myself a competent mechanic, but I also needed them (ess) because as it turned out later I got a kit for an e46 (I have an e85) and certain holes needed to be plugged on the e85 kit (and weren't), which aren't directly apparent.
There's always something that you don't expect when installing these kits. Then it's always great that you can fall back on someone by phone that has lots and lots of experience and not some call center secretary.
I'm not saying that VF's support is bad (because I have no experience with them), but if you say you live in the same town as them and even then didn't get the support you expected on previous purchased products....
Manufacturer support is everything, because if there's something not right (or you have a problem), in practice they are the only ones you can fall back on.
The problem will be far to specific to ask on a forum, because you won't be able to identify in enough detail what's wrong with it (otherwise you would be able to solve it yourself
) in order for someone that has installed this kit once or twice to help you.
As for the installation: if you're going to do it yourself, read the installation manuals from the different suppliers in advance and meticulously to see what you're getting, and if you get a shop to install it make sure they have lots of experience with it (shops want to minimize time spent on it, so if they encounter a problem, they will try and solve it in the shortest time possible, and not necessarily in the best way). If you choose VF, try them to have everything installed. (because if something's not right, they can't blame the manufacturer; that is something a shop can/will try to do).
Reading the different manuals is always interesting as you'll see that they use different solutions for the same problem.
For instance I think that the different manufacturers also choose for different supercharger lubrication methods.