I don't see how classic RS codes could beat Turbo Codes (or LDPC). One of the key innovations of the latter is that they handle soft decoding; i.e., different levels of uncertainty of the incoming bits. It's much better to say that you're only 51% confident that a bit is 0 (when it should be 1) than 100% confident! This is especially important for analog systems (like radios) where the incoming bits naturally come with a confidence value.

There are soft versions of RS codes, but these came much later and use the same iterative techniques that Turbo/LDPC decoders use.