I didn't know you were a developer :). I'm not but fairly astute and I've had a hard time with certain aspects with that plugin. When it crashed I was fairly new to WP and it took me over two hours to figure it out. I fully agree about not having to jump through hoops to uninstall.
My two main use it because quite frankly I finally have it tweaked pretty well and to change over at this point will likely be all day event so I've been trying to avoid it if at all possible.
On other sites that I have set up and/or that have crashed, I've used alternatives depending on the site setup. One uses Super Cache and although it has different content than my other sites, it runs the fastest.
I don't use MAX so that's good to know and I haven't upgraded to 0.9.4 yet.