I've been using brave since it launched early in 2016. It's had some rough patches, but it's coming along nicely. I haven't had any payouts go in BAT yet, but I've made 10 months of $5 payouts in BTC. When they first started payouts, your browser had to be running on the payout date or it got missed, but that problem seems to be resolved now.
I like the new capability that they added where you can now "pin" sites to receive payouts even if you don't visit them. I'm using this to try to support some of the open source products that I use (like LibreOffice.Org).
thanks for the comment, yes, looks like a project with much more "flesh" than one year go.