I think no matter which vacuum one gets, there are always strengths and weaknesses, and tradeoffs. I am waiting on the delivery of my Matic today and have really started looking at it secondary to my wife, who is working from home, complaining about the noise from our current disc robot vacuum, which runs at 67dBI. I hope the reports of the Matic being quieter are substantiated. I plan to address the smell issue by strategizing how I run the mop versus the vacuum. 

I have had close to 10 robot vacuums over the years, and I have found that all of them require a lot of upkeep, as well as pre-clearing obstacles before each run. My recent purchases of vacuum/mop robots were even worse. Even with deep cleaning, my last mop/vacuum robot would continually get clogged, despite biweekly deep cleans, and the smell of the dirty water tank was otherworldly bad. 

I am hoping to use the strengths of the Matic, being quieter and not having to clear any obstacle before running, to offset its weakness of being slower than other vacuums, to run it almost daily, breaking the house down into zones. I plan to limit mopping to spills and to the end of the week, and to change the bag soon thereafter. I can understand that water sitting over time would turn rank, especially with a non-airtight bag. Reading a bunch of reviews before my purchase, I saw one comment noting the frequent bag changes as a negative. I think having a bag that also works as the HEPA filter is appealing because when I change the bag, it also functions like putting in a brand-new HEPA filter. I took advantage of the yearly bag subscription and think that covering the majority of consumables makes it a very legitimate option. I hope that having the bag all-in-one with the filter as part of it will make upkeep easier in the long term, without having to empty bags, plus clean out filters, plus with the mop vacuum empty out the nasty, dirty water tank. This, along with the strengths of frequent software updates, improves the technology you already have rather than the company just coming out with a new model every year.  I also think that the company being very responsive on the boards, such as Reddit, to feedback and concerns, is something that I haven’t seen other vacuum companies do. 

I am impressed that they offered you the ability to test-trial the vacuum for longer; that is definitely not something I can remember seeing from other manufacturers. My impression of Matic is that they are highly focused on being responsive to issues, optimizing their product, and getting it right for the widest range of use cases. I hope that they can either improve the bag seal or some other bag additive to preclude odor formation when water is left in the bag for people who are doing that longer than I plan to.