the sanwa esc is pretty good. No program card necessary. I can adjust the parameters from the sanwa radio and even tye them to trim buttons if i want. brake rate and punch are pretty nice to have on a trim switch as traction goes comes up. I also get logging on the radio of speed, and temperature of the esc and motor. Nothing is without its drawbacks though so if Im going to say allot of nice things I should also point out the bad. I have not used the HW esc but I have studied the way it stages acceleration for mod motors. The sanwa esc is different (more conventional)than the HW and I dont feel it would be easy to dial the acceleration in as well, But I have been running these ESCs for almost 3 years with no failures. not even fans or switches. it handles blinky class stuff very well but I think anything below a 13.5 will take allot of work. im not a dirt guy but if you dont need to really smooth out acceleration everything else is a+.

the manual for setting it up is very detailed and descriptive. the only problem is that the translation isnt good enough to describe everything in a logical fashion if you have not set one up before. most of it is good but you get hung up on a couple steps. after you mess around with it and get one of them working you can go back and read the manual and realize what they were trying to describe but its not good enough to get you through the whole process the first time without any confusion.

I have spoken to people at castle and HW. they have people that know what they are doing. they are RC people but they are also very knowledgeable motor control people. I wont name some of the others I have talked to and I dont want to pass judgement because I may not have talked to the right people but the level of knowledge could be better. The saving grace for these support people at the other MFGs is that they did not BS me about their level of understanding. That always gives extra points.