They are far from abandoned. In fact they are used in production to power Triton cloud's docker emulation. In fact the latest LX-related commit was made 4 days ago (see the commit history of illumos-joyent linked below).
Last time I looked at Smartos, I noticed few issues regarding hardware driver support. Do you know if there has been any improvement in this area, after the acquisition by Samsung.
SmartOS's driver support is being constantly improved, but the improvements are being directed to server hardware (like NICs, for example). So, I wouldn't expect SmartOS (or any illumos distro) to have support for the very latest consumer hardware (like components found in the latest laptops).
I guess it boils down to if you want to run SmartOS as a hobbyist or in an actual DC. I myself got it running on a really old (and cheap) HP Proliant DL360 G6. This involved bypassing the SmartArray and installing an LSI controller, so that ZFS could manage the pool directly. But that was years ago, and maybe you can do better ;)
At any rate, you can check out the following sources related to hardware compatibility:
> In American medical slang, a zebra is a rare and exotic condition that can be conflated with more common ailments
"It's never lupus."
I'm surprised I can't remember that term coming up in House MD. It's an interesting analogy, and this sounds like an extremely interesting talk, but one has to be aware (as the author obviously is) that these conditions are rare and should only be taken into account once the more common potential causes have been ruled out.
