Finding relevant reviews of boutique hardware years after launch from any brand is, I find, harder than it should be. Emotiva's processors are like a lot of products at this level - when they launch, their hardware far outpaces the state of the software. The hardware has a lot of untapped horsepower and over the course of its life the product will have most of its rough edges polished smooth. Most of the reviews of the Emotiva RMC-1 still available online by reputable reviewers, for example, are deep dives into a product whose name still exists but the processor is in a very different form today. The processor as reviewed no longer exists. And by the time we're several generations of software revisions into the life cycle, you're hard pressed to find a professional reviewer willing to give the product another exhaustive battery of tests - the machine is old, unsexy news.
That's where the user base comes in. It's like buying any other niche product - You might want to take into account the company's history of software updates and, perhaps just as importantly, how active the users are. You know how buying a 3D printer, it's probably more important to see how active and numerous the users/owners are than any tech specs (which in 3D printings case, are usually just the product of off-the-shelf parts anyway, so specs between companies don't vary all too much anyway.). Boutique home theater electronics are the same. The health of the culture around a product will tell you everything you need to know and can't find in stale reviews.
Long story short, Emotiva make rock solid amps (arguably in the conversation for the standard here, when all is said and done), processors that need a touch of massaging but yield industry leading results and well worth the effort, and an installed user base, with a knowledge base that that implies, that can see you through just about any unique use case you can come up with. You might get better performance (and I mean might) out of a Trinnov, but have fun tracking down someone that can answer a question when things go sideways.
There are other companies that produce quality processors and amps that the above applies equally to. Anthem comes to mind.
jmho