Only played with NFS for one share after SMB was being odd. Always read about using NFS rather than SMB in all scenarios since it's supposed to be much quicker.
Should definitely be better than Samba, yeah. And I liked it apart from it just flaking out every couple of days. Probably my fault but I couldn't be arsed spending much time sorting it out since I don't need 99% of its features - I just want super-easy access to files across the network and sshfs is kinda perfect for that.
How are you mounting stuff? Via fstab?
I remember years ago having various issues with network shares dropping out mounted using fstab and having to do "mount -a" far too often. Then I moved to autofs and it fixed all issues. If you're already using it then no idea, if you're not it might be worth playing with.
Setup was fine, it just needed to be restarted every few days which was a pain. Couldn't be arsed to dig into it since it was overkill for what I needed anyway.