There's a Boogie for everyone, but not everyone will like every Boogie. I couldn't use (or afford) a Roadking or a Rectifier. The Mark IV - an incredible amp - was out of my price range, and more amp than I needed. I tried to like the Lonestars, but couldn't get what I wanted out of them. The Stilettos didn't seem to work for me either. For me, the F-50 was just right.
Although I'm sure others will disagree, the F-50 is a very good amp in my opinion. I was running a DC-3 for years, but needed a little extra headroom, so I started looking for something to fit the bill, and the F-50 does the job really well. So now I use both amps, sometimes together, sometimes not. The F-50 generally gets used for larger venues.
The thing with the F-50 is that it's a very straightforward amp, and therefore not particularly versatile when compared with some of the other Boogie offerings. From my perspective this was an advantage, not a disadvantage. Two channels, independent controls for each, portable, relatively inexpensive, and a pleasure to play. I think the F series in general suffered somewhat in terms of reputation among the afficianados because it was essentially the Boogie "entry level" line, although I think we can pretty much all agree that there's nothing entry-level about anything Boogie makes.
I love the clean channel on mine - I think it stacks up great against almost anything else. It's totally transparent, and feels to me like an old Fender Twin on steriods - ballsy, very articulate, and nice and bouncy. Channel 2 takes a little getting used to in terms of getting the settings right, but once you figure it out, it's a fantastic heavy crunch channel with the gain dialled up, and with medium levels of gain, it's a very useful overdriven rhythm channel. The contour feature's pretty cool too, because it can be used to give you a solo boost if you're not using too much overdive, and if you have the gain turned up high you get pretty close to rectifier territory, which is also useful. It definitely does the Boogie singing lead with aplomb. As stated before, it's a loud amp. I think a lot of people got the amp thinking it would be a great little home project/bedroom amp, but found out it's really not - you have to open it up to really get a feel for what it's capable of doing, and you have to take a little time to figure out the interaction of all the tone controls - like all Boogies. If you're not experienced with these high end tube amps, the temptation for a lot of the kids out there is to dime everything. The F-50 (and most other Boogies, as far as I have experienced) don't respond well to this approach.
The one weird "negative" that keeps coming up is the footswitch which doesn't have an LED to tell you when the reverb's engaged. And for what it's worth, I'm not particularly fond of the reverb on the amp anyway. It's usable, but not really dynamic.
As far as why there aren't many "pros" out there using this series, I have no idea. I'm not a pro, but I'm a regularly gigging and recording musician, and find this amp works great for me. I definitely had some issues in the beginning which it turns out stemmed from a bad speaker which was replaced free of charge. Since then, not a single problem and total reliability and consistency. I can't ask for more.
