I think easier to manage as well but that could just be the cleaner design.  It's a toss up.  S9 gets better $$ for sure.. but if a board goes down on it within 2-6months and you have to send it back to china and be piss out of the miner for repair for 1-2months you have to figure if that is worth it over spending a little bit more, but then running for a year + and no issues for a avalon miner in general.  It's USUALLY, key word "USUALLY", better to buy products when it comes to mining IMO based off longterm reliability and roi.  My 741's might have been doing half the hash rate of a s9 the past few months, but in that time frame my friends s9's has had 2/10 fail to the point of needing repairs and I believe some chips or a board or something fried to lower the TH/S on a couple others now.  Besides the loss of profit, it was a miserable headache to get the work done on them, he wound up ebaying them as is and ordering new ones.  My avalons on the other hand, have been running flawlessly since and we both got them at same time (knock on wood).