I was very hopeful for ntfs3, but unfortunately I think it was doomed from the start because of the ill blood built during the initial "code donation" regarding code quality, egos, and general stability.

Ntfsplus looks very promising based on this email and what's been done already. Something as "simple" as writing an fsck utility (something linux never had for ntfs) tells me that the author actually cares about real world usage. And that makes me very hopeful!