It's usually a bad idea to recommend a scope before it's been thoroughly tested, regardless of the make, don't you think?
It depends greatly on the brand whether I take the specs at face value or with a large grain of salt. I'm not overly concerned about bugs because people make mistakes and there is a lot of pressure to put a product on the market. However what matters most is whether bugs get fixed within a couple of weeks (good) or years later (very bad).
Yeah, that makes a big difference, for sure. How quickly a manufacturer fixes bugs can be a moving target, however. Take Instek for instance. Apparently (see
https://www.eevblog.com/forum/testgear/opinions-on-gw-instek-scopes/msg1131121/#msg1131121) they were slow to fix at least some bugs in the GDS-2104. But your experience with the GDS-2204E was quite different, and much better.
Similarly, Siglent's bug fix rate was atrocious for the SDS-2000 (for which they were rightly much maligned), but has apparently been much better for the SDS-2000X and SDS-1000X scopes.
And even Rigol has improved their game with the DS-1054Z (though we still await the firmware they said they'd release by the end of January).
Ofcourse the promised functionality should be there from day one. Personally I feel better about extra functions getting added later than missing functions when I buy a piece of equipment.
Which scopes had certain functionality in the specs that wasn't actually present
at all at launch? It's one thing for the functionality to be buggy (which can easily be to the point of unusability, of course), but quite another for it to not be present in the first place.