Dan,
By "lemon" as you should well know, I meant something that does not perform to specs.
Actually, V-ways have only one practical advantage over flat ways. When the rear of the rear way and front of the front way wears and you tighten up the rear gib to compensate, you may not be able to run the carriage all the way to the right end of the bed. Otherwise, both are subject to the same vertical errors due to wear in the vertical direction and horizontal errors due to horizontal wear. The real problem is that the Atlas ways were not hardened, to reduce their acquisition cost. It is very unlikely that anyone at Atlas expected that so many of their machines would still be doing productive work 80 years on. The largest lathe that I ever saw was a flat bed. It was literally large enough to mount a 10EE on its faceplate. I imagine that the steady rest probably weighed more than my Land Rover. I hired the company that owned it to turn some artificial defects in the OD of a 20 foot length of 48" 0.562" wall X60 line pipe. The only problem I had with it was that they wouldn't let me run it.
Your point #2 is valid up to a point. But the Atlas lathes were actually designed to be mounted to a better than average grade of bench or stand and solidly anchored to the floor, slab or deck. But too many hobbyists slap them onto a flimsy bench and add insult to injury by putting castors under the bench. Properly installed, even the 3/8" bed machines do considerably better than their reputation among owners of certain badges claim. Plus the reason that there are so few 10EE's around is that that they cost so much that few could afford them. Which wasn't the case with the Atlas machines.
The Atlas change gears when new are stronger than cast iron gears and a bunch less expensive than hobbed steel gears. The problem is that an estimated 10% of them over the years fell victim to something called Zinc Pest, caused by Zinc of insufficient purity being used to cast them. Atlas did make the mistake of making a few parts out of Zamak that they shouldn't have. All of those problems were corrected by about 1936, and only the Zinc Pest problem (which didn't appear until after WW-II) remained until about 1979 when someone (probably an accountant working for Clausing) ignored history and repeated the mistake. Which along with competition from cheap foreign manufacturers killed the line.
You have to adequately define "inferior". If you mean less runout, the theoretical difference is about 0.001" or less. Which is better than one usually expects from any 3-jaw chuck regardless of how it is mounted. That could actually have been eliminated by the simple expedient of replacing the straight register with a more expensive tapered one. But the cost-benefit ratio did not support that. If you mean not being able to take a heavy cut in reverse, again the cost outweighed the benefit. There are only a few normal lathe operations where you need to run the spindle in reverse. There is an easy workaround for cutting left-hand threads. Grinding in reverse isn't a problem. And if you must put a heavy load on the chuck, then you buy a screw-on chuck designed for that. I have one but have so far never needed to use it. In the larger diameters (larger than anything that Atlas built), there begin to be problems with mounting and dismounting threaded chucks so different and more expensive chuck mounting methods are used. Plus Atlas is far from the only lathe manufacturer to use threaded-nose spindles. All of their competition did as well.
In any case, we don't deliberately bad-mouth other people or their equipment on this site. Regardless of what brand it is or where it was made.
