Yes, Ray modified the dumb strings so they are no longer burning out. I've had the new strings running for a couple weeks now and every node is still working. I was waiting a little longer to post an update to that bad nodes thread because I didn't want to jump the gun.
As far as brightness goes, converting objects from incans to dumb strings, you need a fraction of the nodes. As much as led strings look brighter than incans, the dumb strings (and smart) make the traditional led strings look dim. However, 50 lights that are way brighter than 200 incans, still looks like less lights. You don't need quite as many, but you still want it to look covered. For a 5 foot tree, I used 200 nodes with 2 controllers. 100 just didn't look like enough, but starting off that may be enough. Don't worry about brightness, just overall coverage. If you're short on channels, you can do all 200 nodes with 3 channels, just have both DSCs set to the same channels. I went with 6 so that I could do each string in a different color at times. Also, if you're wrapping these around tree limbs, you may want want to split the strings in half with a waterproof connector between each half as the strings are long. I don't do the traditional "wrap around the perimeter" approach, rather wrap the strings around individual limbs, and long strings get in the way.
Keep in mind, my perspective may be warped as I look at my 25k+ lights and it still doesn't look like that many lights to me, however I can see a glow in the sky above my house a 1/4 mile away.
Another nuisance is that everything runs off of 12vdc, which means you need power supplies nearby for everything.
Also consider what software you're going to use. You're going to spend a year per song if you stick with Vixen 2.x if you want to do anything with rgb color. I tried for a couple days and gave up. Your software has to natively support picking colors and treating all 3 channels as 1 rgb channel.
