Matt,
I am reading this only now. We are renting space for one of our sites in Seville (Spain), and it came with UniFi WAPs. I have very little experience with them. But I can tell you that we're getting way more complaints than I would expect, at least if compared with similar setting (in terms of nr. of people, nr. of waps, and size of the areas to be covered) where we use Cisco Aironet WAPs. I can tell you that in my experience Aironet WAPs are quite stable and effective. Have you ruled out Cisco for some reason?
Price is the only reason. I can get 3 to 5 UniFi APs for what I'm seeing those Aironet APs going for on Amazon. I'm working with clients who are much smaller than the kind who would need 40 APs, so price is an issue.
As to a controller, Aironets are so stable that we basically never have to reconfigure them. We have 40 devices in the building where I work, and we have no controller. I'd definitely benefit from one, but not hugely. I agree that a controller will bring benefits to roaming, in theory, as mentioned above. BUT, as a matter of fact, in the 40 WAPs setup we have, roaming never seemed to be an issue. So, I would assume that Aironets will work well in smaller environments.
I think this largely depends on the type of environment you're talking about. If you have a largely stationary user base, roaming isn't much of an issue. If you're going to have people moving all over your building, roaming is essential. For my own home, roaming would be essential. I'm sick of having my devices struggle in vain to connect to an AP on the other side of my house when I'm sitting right next to another AP.
Basically, I like the flexibility of the UniFi products. I don't think they're perfect, but they fit a specific need and they do it at very low costs...
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