I’ve had a set on (on a Middleburn RS7 crank) for a while now and I’ve never had such front-gear stuff troubles. Dropping chain, chainsuck, poor shifting in all directions, the lot. Before the Middleburns I’d always had Shimano, and briefly some RaceFace, rings and had nowhere near the level of grief I’m getting now.

Am I alone?

Slick-shift or not? If not, you bought the wrong ones.

i had a middleburn ring on my old marin, a replacement for shimano, it wasnt as slick as shimano, but it was reasonably light and it lasted a long long time, like 5 years.
if you are getting chainsuck are you sure the ring or chain arent fubar?
check your mech alignment too.
EDIT: its only fair to say, i now use shimano rings.

Not slick-shift, no 🙁

They came with the cranks, which were second hand, but the rings are brand new.

Chain’s in decent nick (although I’ll give it a measure to see if it’s stretched) and I removed, cleaned and refitted the mech to make sure it’s properly in place.

Just looked at replacement Shimano rings, blimmin’ heck they’ve gone up in price!

Have run assorted Middleburn cranks and rings for donkeys years. Mainly the same rings as they don’t seem to wear out. Had the same hard coat set for at least 10 years and am only not using them as my Klein has ended up with blingy gold ones and both other bikes wear UNO rings.
Only problem I ever had was with a blue ano granny ring which had to be run the wrong way round or it would skip under load.

I find the non-slickshift one’s are ok as grannys and outers but you need a shiftshift as a middle.

They last far, far longer than Shimano and are cheaper especially in the old XTR spec.

Clearly of no real help but I’ve used hardcoat slick shift middleburn rings and had no problems.
And yes.. Shimano stuff has really gone up in price!