Every such "compact, directly replace..." is a heavy compromise. Costing either a hughe technology complexity (so cost), poor reliability or bad output.
So if you want a reasonable performance at a reasonable cost, dont use any of those retrofits, but a proper purpose made fixture, not needing those extreme compromises in their design.
This applies to all af the technologies ever used: Incandescents replacing oil lamps at homes 120 years ago, HIDs replacing incandescents for street lights 70 years ago, fluorescents or LEDs replacing incandescents at homes the last three decades.
No exception.
You can actually get good retrofits, it depends of how much you want to spend, so what product you buy and where you buy it. If you buy it my local supermarket of course your retrofit will be unreliable, if they sell actual garbage CFLs with 22lm/w 3k that can easily be beaten by some halogens or SBMVs, but the good side is that they sell that garbage for dirt cheap (it costed me around $1,98). The funny thing is that the supermarket chain imported that garbage under their own brand, and considering the price, they just bought to the cheapest and crappiest CFL supplier. But why would the employee import such crap in the first place, I wouldn't mind of paying double for for a little bit more quality? Note that I was aware of that I was buying dirt, I just bought it like some kind of historic piece.
Back to the topic, the reliability of the retrofit purely depends of how much you want to spend, there will be a huge difference between a 20+ bucks retrofit and the 2 bucks crap I bought. And if there's much compromise between price and quality you can find an equilibrium that adapts to you.