AM firmware is just VNISH firmware with custom skin and decent integration with AM. IF you have a large farm it can come handy to control everything from AM.
I do agree that if you use AM the firmware should be at least with a very low dev fee.
As for the firmware, if you manually tweak S9 best i could achieve was 13.8 ths/1150W which is not bad regarding th/w.
What settings did you use to achieve this result? Been playing around with diff auto-tune settings, but haven't been able to get my W/Th that low. Thanks!!