Last week was my first experience unboxing a Vera (Plus) and I was horrified, no appalled, at going through exactly the same thing.
I'm a programmer at heart for over 35 years, and an IT Manager of 15 years, so I have a fair idea what I am doing.
I had to almost beat the bejesus out of the thing to get it going again, after which it once again wanted to do the firmware update. Yep, back to the same disaster.
And again after that too.
Eventually it worked the fourth time from memory - albeit the next surprise was learning quirks like the pairing/unpairing not being reliable and having to do it multiple times, variables not always sticking (or, as it seems, they do but the UI doesn't realise it for ages and gives you wrong info), etc.
Not a good start.
Then, two days later, it tells me it has another firmware update. You guessed it - never starts up again. However, after power cycling the bloody thing it did seem to continue the update and completed.
I chose Vera over the Home Centre 2 because a few people said the HC2 can be unreliable... so far I'm in a lot of regret over that, who the heck ships a product that fails straight out the box.
That said, I am open to the fact that a few posts here suggest the past month worth of firmware updates have been very flakey... but to not realise you're unleashing that hell upon brand new customers is unforgivable, talk about serious quality control

Am hoping that's the end of my troubles... albeit I'm having significant problems with the Z-UNO which Vera doesn't recognise, installs as generic devices, and an issue is occurring that the vendor claims is Vera's fault... so my confidence is taking another hit.