>I had no significant problems with DBC. I don't know why you had but I do not remember a global discussion of huge problems with them.
The one problem is when you get a table from someone, and it's not a match to your dbc, and it requires one. This can happen for various reasons - wrong dbc being active when the table was created, so its header doesn't point where we'd think it would; the dbf and dbc are not the same version (i.e. one of them was restored from backup which is older than the latest structure of that dbf as registered in the dbc), or that would happen with the cdx. IOW, when people try to manipulate the files as in the free table days.
Some kind of table migration tool would have been welcome at times but this kind of snafu happened not often enough to justify the time to write it.