I agree, the steering servo on my 5ive-T failed after a summer of hard bashing. The argument then becomes did a part wear out or did it break, when it fails after only a month of use I'd call that a broken part. It isn't as painful buying a replacement for a part that wears out as it is when parts break.
My experience with the Rovan LT305 vs. a
Losi 5ive-T has been the Rovan drive line is prone to breakages where as the Losi tends to wear out. My Rovan only has one stock drive line component left, and the truck only has 4-5 gallons through it. The Losi still has a mostly stock drive line and has probably 12-15 gallons of fuel through it.
I really wish the Rovan had been has good as the Losi at half the cost but it wasn't, and by the time I had the Rovan for a month the cost of replacement parts had raised the cost of owning it to the point that I could have bought a second Losi and had a lot less down time waiting for replacement parts. The breakages also discouraged my son because he was afraid to drive it for fear that it was going to break again, not a good thing.
I have to say it is frustrating as all get out when a noob with a clone comes into a forum telling folks clones are every bit as good as the original at a fraction of the cost, these forum posts live forever!
My experience with clones is they just don't hold up like the name brands. In my group of friends there are clones and name brand rigs both Bajas and 5ives, KM and Rovan, Losi and HPI, and the clones have more issues. You could make the argument that the guys that have clones are on a tighter budget and can't afford to maintain their rigs to the same level, but my personal experience negates that argument, I am fortunate enough to have the ability to maintain two trucks to a pretty high level, and am hopefull that the rovans issues are behind me now, but it came at a pretty high price! It is much more expensive to build a rig piece by piece as they break, not to mention the down time waiting for parts, time to do the repairs, trying to anticipate what will break next.
Now if you are debating a clone of a 5ive or a DBXL I would say it's an even match the guys I run with that had DBXLs had a lot of reliability issues.
..buy cheap but twice imo
...I'd go for a servo of atleast 20kg's on throttle/brake.
.....sa1231