A lot of people are criticizing this product. Does anyone know what "best in class" small-scale farming or gardening projects are? Very curious! Also any community recommendations would be great.
I think you're misinterpreting the criticisms. It's not "this particular product is a bad implementation compared to other one-size-fits-all tech-solutionism products", but rather "a one-size-fits-all tech-solutionism approach to this problem space doesn't make any sense"
This is a very typical tech-industry "everything looks like a nail" type issue: going into an area you don't understand with a solution to problems that don't exist.
A small subset of problems here:
1. A robot should automate things you do often/regularly - developing complex machinery do to one-off seasonal steps steps like seeding & pulling is immensely wasteful - that's going to raise the cost of the product a lot just in order to automate tasks you rarely do.
2. It doesn't do those tasks well: the pulling examples are contrived & the failure rates look high.
3. The watering mechanism is developed to suit the robot design rather than designing the robot around optimal watering strategies - this completely ignores generations of optimising watering approaches. The watering mechanism is actively harmful to many crops.
4. Very unadaptable to different plants' needs.
TL;DR: There is no best of class product in this area because only someone who doesn't understand the problem space would try to develop a product to do this.
If you have resources I can read or learn from about all this, please share them. You've clearly got wisdom in this space!