Are soft boot bindings adequate for off piste?

[NTwoO]

First post on the forum! Hope all had a good ECS.

We were just in St Anton for a week with nine guys. In the space of a week we broke 7 soft boot bindings. I only spent half a day riding on soft boots breaking 2 bindings and spending more time in the Rendl gondola than on the powder. The guys at the rental shop organised me an F2 boxer that out performed the Ride Yukon in the powder and with simple indestructible hard boot bindings I could happily go far from the piste knowing that my gear, or at least the bindings would not fail. Maybe our South-African pedigree requires a little more from the equipment and rather low temperatures ensured that the plastics got brittle, but this is not reliable enough for anything more than 10 meters from the piste in my view.

The boxer performed nicely after I ripped the rail out of my Nidecker proto that had a stone nic on the heel side by my front foot. It was an old defect, but after a long abuse at sonnekopf where I had the northern-most (unmarked) piste virtually to myself for a whole day, the rail popped.