Well, I had eight years and some 5000 hours on the 146 and frankly I didn't recognise most of the sneering comments and general denigration of an aeroplane which was generally a delight to fly. Yes, it could run out of steam when heavily laden on a hot day and the APU really wasn't man enough for the job but the controls were well-harmonised and the trailing-link undercarriage permitted a soft landing almost every time. Everyone likes to criticise the Lycoming engine but in my eight years I never had any problems certainly no in-flight shutdowns and the only impact of the so-called roll-back problem was the restriction to FL260 and the need to memorise another page of check-list items for one's recurrent checks.
The APU did fail on a regular basis so we all became adept at operating without it. There was also a period where flap failures were common due, I think, to the incorrect lubrication being used at the time. Again most crews became familiar with the flapless landing procedure. Regarding the smelly cabin, I can only recall one instance when we were due to take over an aircraft in which the cabin stank to high heaven. Snagging it in the tech log resulted in an aircraft change and the engineers sorted out the problem.
I was very happy to spend a fairly large part of my flying career on what was essentially Britain's last airliner.