What a weird turn this thread has taken!
It's hardly fact that they are 'shit'. For some people they don't work properly and that's rubbish. The infrastructure needs work. But for 99% of people, a 'broken' smart meter is a smart meter that doesn't send readings and they just have to send them manually. Like they were doing before. If you don't care about smart tariffs or any of those things then having a smart meter won't really change anything. Either it 'works', so you don't have to do meter reads, or it doesn't and you read the meter manually just like now.
But for the many people who do have working ones, there's the potential to save a lot of money. What is fact that I have paid less per unit of energy than anyone with a traditional meter for the last year because I'm on a special smart meter tariff. You can debate whether those tariffs are morally right or whether you agree with time of use tariffs or whatever all day long, but the fact is that I have saved hundreds of pounds over someone without a smart meter, so I'm definitely not going to say mine is shit while I'm quids in because of it.
Anyway at the end of the day, they aren't making traditional meter replacements as a matter of course now, they're old technology like analogue TVs and all that jazz and everyone will eventually have one whether they like it or not, so no point getting worked up about it.