Generally speaking, the current list of strings, strips, and nodes found in the wiki are pretty good. There is a NORMAL failure rate that is tolerable, and it can be offset by requesting from ray some "spares" that you can then use to "swap out" failed with spare pixels.
The issues seen this year were due to our attempts to order from off the approved list... finding what should be compatible pixels, but in new/different configurations to offer more choices in our displays. Some of these options looked great on paper, and even in the demos -- but in real life they had problems.
Not everything had problems... a few guys in the forum have tried a lot of ray's offerings and they've had great success.
Maybe a survey is needed to formally collect data on these "grey-area" products. The survey might tell us how many people have tried the product against DLA controllers, and what failure rates were experienced with each.