I can't speak for others, necessarily, but I wheeled with a friend with a 1st generation Tacoma with a drop bracket lift. The negatives:
- Lift used inferior hardware. The rubber bushings that the front diff mounted to were absolute junk. This allowed the front diff to move excessively and eventually broke the steel diff mount that is near the pinion yoke. This steel mount was part of the drop bracket itself and had to be welded back together.
- Coating (paint or powder coat, couldn't tell) on drop bracket was absolute junk and allowed severe rust issues.
- The steel used on the drop bracket was absolute junk. Once the coating was gone, the steel plate that the drop bracket was fabricated out of started to flake severely. It looked like a delicious flaky croissant. This made him very concerned about the safety of the vehicle over time.
- The drop bracket itself caused worse than stock front ground clearance. We compared with a stock 1st generation Tacoma and it had about 0.5" less ground clearance, even though the lifted Tacoma had 33" tires and the stocker had 31" tires.
- As you all know - the factory cross member had been cut, so there was almost no going back. I've seen one person on this forum reverse a cut factory cross member, but not all trucks are worth this kind of work...
Even if you find a drop bracket that was of higher quality than my friends, you will still deal with the ground clearance issues. Granted, folks with solid front axles deal with similar ground clearance...
Dan