I have really un-fond memories of doing replication with an Oracle publisher (with SQL 2005). That was a nightmare, random data conversion errors that were incredibly hard to track (errors didn't indicate in any way what article was the problem), subscribers being invalidated for no apparent reason, at one point the snapshot agent hung after the 255th article any time it ran. That required a complete tear-down and reconfigure to get past.

Keep things simple and replication works. Try to get fancy and it's a recipe for pain.

At the very least it (and many other components of SQL) needs better monitoring built in. Way better.