I got in the habit of doing soldered point-to-stock rail fine wire jumpers on every turnout I own before I installed them, and that includes Peco and Atlas. I had the same kind of corrosion-based failures on anything with a pressure-based connection, rivet, or rail joiner, it was more a matter of time than if it would fail electrically. Accepting that there is no reliability in turnouts at all without some help is a great step toward long-term sanity in N. Maybe there should be a perfect RTR turnout but accepting there isn't is a Cosmic Serenity moment.
So I won't specifically dump on Atlas compared to anybody else, or say that somebody else's turnout is the solution, because as far as I'm concerned I have yet to find a 'perfect' out-of-the-box turnout that didn't need some tweaking to make completely reliable, either for electrical issues, derailment burs, gauge, etc. If you have the skills to make your own, bless you, but most (including me) don't. I can solder up jumpers though.
But what I do remember is the catastrophe that hit Jerry Britton's semi-built PRR layout when he had many systematic electrical failures and even structural failures (points coming apart) on his installed Atlas C55 switch collection. Atlas did replace a lot of them due to to proven failure, but it was so demoralizing to him that he dropped out of N entirely and scrapped the layout, and that was the most incredible prototype design layout I've ever seen and the most volume of C55 I've ever seen in my life. Suddenly my Pecos and C80's didn't bother me as much. Many of them have been in service now since 1983 with nothing more than cleaning.
