This is as good a thread for my first as any. Been lurking for a while.
Been enjoying specialty coffee with various brewed preparations for about 2 years. Went from a blade grinder, to a Hario Skerton, to the Breville. I'm expecting delivery of a Rocky tomorrow.
The Smart Grinder is a great grinder for drip or any method requiring "medium" to "fine" particle sizes. It DOES NOT do a fine enough espresso grind (for a non-pressurized ports filter that is). I have a Gaggia, only a month old so I'm no expert, but the Breville cannot grind fine enough. The Hario is capable of grinding much finer, but obviously lacks in degrees of adjustability without modification, and you'd be crazy to grind that fine by hand everyday.
I should have just coughed up the extra $150 for the Rocky compared to Breville, but I had 20% of BBB coupon. They kindly agreed to refund me this product since it didn't meet my needs.
Now one could argue I should have used the same logic and paid $100-200 extra from the Rocky price point and just got a Mazzer or Macap. I'll wait to upgrade though. I bounce around from brew methods and I think the Rocky looks like it will do better going back and forth from pourover to espresso. Time will tell.
The SmartGrinder is only suited for non-espresso. Also the coarsest setting is not consistent for French Press. However it's not a huge problem, tighten the grind slightly and it becomes much more consistent and you can just shorten the brew time a little.
Just my $0.02, hopefully it will help somebody else's decision making.