In my opinion and based on past experience, all resellers of small-weird-country ccTLDs are equally shitty and have equally terrible customer service. Margins are very thin. At least if I buy a "new" TLD from a company that resells one of Donuts LLC's huge number of new generic TLDs, I can have some confidence that Donuts actually runs a 24 hour operation.

The ICANN vetting process and procedures to set up a new gTLD (let's use .network as an example) are much more thorough than the traditional two letter ccTLD. There are ccTLDs run by countries that edit the zonefiles by hand and don't even have a WHOIS server online.

for example using the current issue, nic.sm doesn't even run https on their webserver.

Or if I buy a .com from namecheap I can set up 2FA at my registrar, point it at my own authoritative nameservers, and trust that it won't fail.