All in all, I was "very very" happy to find that maniacbug's library and examples worked
without any MAJOR debugging efforts. In contrast, I spent several weeks mucking with the
stupid JeeNode library and s.w. before it would ever work, and then I only got lucky in the
end - ie, found a sketch in the Arduino Cookbook that worked right the first time.
OTOH, after just 1 day of testing, I'm already very disappointed with the nRF24L01 modules.
Power is too weak, and range is too small. They are basically ok for "in the same room".
After playing with Xbees for 7 or 8 years, it's very hard to beat them for ease of use and long
usable range. Nothing else comes even close, even if they are a more expensive. Maybe you
get what you pay for. The only real problem with XBees is that most of the shields are poorly
designed.