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To the best of my knowledge, smach is not deprecated. And for sure, I still maintain FlexBE and develop new features from time to time. In fact, FlexBE internally relies on some smach core functionality and my experience with it is quite good. However, I cannot comment on the more specific smach functionality like smach_ros or the visualization, although I experienced problems with it when I used it a few years ago.

The main motivation for developing FlexBE was that some features where missing for us in smach. This includes for example a good visualization, a visual editor, an efficient runtime monitoring, a way for operator-robot shared autonomy, and in terms of software development, a clear structure of how to define and test re-usable state definitions. All this is addressed in FlexBE. Anyways, smach is great work and if you are confident that you only need a very simple statemachine and nothing like an editor or so, smach should be a good and sufficient choice as well.

In any case, feel free to contact me via the contact form of the FlexBE website or Github if you have feedback regarding FlexBE. :)