Now that my hometown is going totally LED and HPS will soon become a thing of the past, I got to thinking about the fixtures these past 35 years.
Namely the NEMA buckets because normally that's what FPL only uses on residential roads.
I'd like to hear some opinions as to whether or not one manufacturer was better than the other or are they all pretty much the same.

FPL only used 2 models of HPS buckets.
The GE 201SA and the ITT/AE/AEL series 11.
From the way it looks it seems like the GE outlives the series 11 many times over but that's somewhat difficult to say as the GE was more common than the series 11, say 60/40 percent.

I do know that regardless of the make/model when a fixture had to be replaced more often than not it was the ignitor to blame.

For some reason FPL decided that it wasn't worth the hassle to determine if the ignitor was to blame and to replace it.

I think the GE fixtures contained genuine GE gear, while the AEL's use Advance ballasts.

Yeah GE made their own HPS ballast until the end of HID luminaire production while AEL switched from making their own to sourcing the ballasts from Advance, possibly during the early 2000s.

I think GE also made plug in ignitors standard on their newer HPS luminaires so replacing ignitors in the field was about as easy as swapping a PC.