A couple of years ago when I was looking to create a directory site Brilliant Directories did come across my radar and was a consideration. At the time, the cost and the look of the themes was what held me back. I did the demo and spoke to an agent but wasn't sold. I was surprised to see them come to Appsumo because they have been in the biz now for a decade focusing on directory type sites.
I am currently half-way through a local directory - classified site using a Wordpress theme when I saw that this was on offer. So last night I pulled the trigger on Tier 5 and spent the next 4 hours poking around and starting to develop a theme.
From what I can see they have put a lot of thought into the features they offer, but I think the challenge will be figuring out their process of making those features available. For example, I tried playing around with the forms to add different field types and it appears to be more complicated than what I have been used to using Gravity Forms. There isn't much in the way of drag&drop anywhere which I have to say I have been getting used to with new products and updates. There are a lot of video walkthroughs that I will need to make use of to figure out how to customize the forms for what I am looking for ... and I'm pretty sure I will be able to figure out.
When I was making style/colour changes to the homepage using the live-view the settings didn't translate back to the dashboard even after saving. This happened with several attempts and ended up finding the areas in the dashboard to make the changes permanent. That is an area where some improvement could be made. That live view is very similar to the customize appearance in WP and would be nice to have additional features like font styles added to see how they will look live on the page.
When you look at their changelog it is robust and well-documented which I like to see and shows their dedication to improving the product.
The backend dashboard I think could use some cleaning up. I'm not a fan of the comic-looking font and would like the boxes of settings to be aligned a little more straight-forward. Everything about the settings is big. Big boxes, fonts and taking up lots of screen space. A little more whitespace would actually improve the design and make it easier to find the settings you are looking to change. At first blush, this is a better product then it was a couple of years ago and I imagine sumolings will help get this product to being top of class.
There's going to be a lot of digging around and exploring this over the next couple of days but I'm confident at this point that I will likely abandon my half-designed WP directory and sink those efforts here. Certainly more features, site hosting, all-in-one payments, marketing messages, advertising and mobile features are a no-brainer ... and at this price it's worthwhile investment in my opinion.