For some background info, I’ve been climbing and belaying top rope for about 2 years, at the moment, I’m practicing lead belaying and prefer the ATC over the grigri when I belay because of the least friction when taking and giving slack.
I’ve researched the giga jul and mammut smart 2.0 but see too many cons from the community from those two.
I would like to use the giga jul because of the versatility, however on thicker ropes, many people report issues, seeing as how I will do a lot of belaying with indoor gym ropes, this is a serious disadvantage, but the advantage that it has for multipitching and abseiling sounds amazing.
I would need this belay to be auto locking because of gym rules.
I’ve used many different belay devices. For a lot of my climbing, my partners take a lot in order to figure out sequences. So for me, my preferred device is a grigri (it really doesn’t matter which iteration), but I have a bad and expensive habit of leaving them at the gym and people steal them :(
I’ve used a megajul a fair bit but I will say it has one major flaw in my opinion. A number of years ago I was belaying a leader and at one point during the climb I was paying attention to them and not my hands. I had inadvertently put my thumb in the rope loop instead of the handle loop in the front of the device. If the leader had fallen off at that time, my thumb would have been amputated. It really weirds me out how easy that is to do on that device.