Been doing this a while now and its got to the point where a market going down barely inconveniences you much; you just look for your vendor or DOC on grams search engine, join a new market if need be and go about your business.

 when I order I spend it as soon as its on the market and so I'm lucky to have only ever lost a few satoshis in the various seizures, exit scams and mysterious disappearances.

There are so much better resources available to us now. I remember when the original SR went down and everyone on the forum were like "What do we do now?" and frantically PMing vendors on the forums for contact details.

At that time everyone was using PGP to encrypt addys but I think a lot of people had not realised its value as a way to prove continuity of identity.

I and many others wished we had kept copies of vendors PGP keys, and made sure they had ours. There was a good job done in assembling a list of verified vendors but a lot was lost and a lot of people had to start from scratch.(because customers need good stats too. I left off ordering for a while after first SR went because I couldn't be bothered dealing with the first few buys as a newbie; having to FE and being a good mark for selective scamming)

Nowadays vendors move to new markets much more smoothly, they all understand the value of having a permanent PGP key to prove its them when they start on a new market.

I've noticed also that a good many vendors across the board require FE these days; its not difficult to see why since it makes their business much simpler. its just another one of those tragedy of the commons type situations where the selfish dicks trying to get something for nothing have ruined it for the rest of us.

Nucleus still seems fine to me, the latest market i tried was valhalla (used to be/still is called silkkitie) as a vendor i have used a while opened there when abraxas stopped working.
I found it basic but good, it is laid out in a functional clean way that reminds me of original SR, it runs fast and you can use 2FA with your PGP key both to log on and release funds. seems to have been pottering along for a while serving mostly scandanavia by the look of it, but a very usable market place if you like to keep things simple.