Regarding reliability, I used reiser3 now exclusively on my 2.6.2 laptop and have done every murderous thing possible to it including hard poweroffs in busy-writes and numerous attempts to get software-suspend working (got it in the end but did many horrible things to my system in the process, reiser took it all without blinking).

I understand that there were problems in the past, and I would highly recommend that solid testing be done prior to deployment on a production platform, but I really do think the solution superior to the directory hashing workaround if the option is available.