Lloyd Chambers (diglloyd.com) heavily revisited his original comments.
http://diglloyd.com/articles/Recommended/tripod-head-ArcaSwissCube.html As to his comment: "DIGLLOYD: why does a company ship a wonderful head with a clamp that is literally non-functional with all of my camera plates? "
The blame is on Really Right Stuff: they made the decision to make their plates about 1mm wider than everyone else's and several of their clamps, especially the lever clamps, are sized to only work with their plates and maybe the ones from Wimberley. If you only buy from RRS then you have no problems , but some of us have plates from a wide range of manufacturers and it seems to me that RRS clearly made a marketing decision to try and lock their customers into only being able to use their products.
I own and use a lot of Really Right Stuff gear: My Arca-Swiss B1 Monoball has a PCL-1 clamp mounted on it, I have multiple Camera Bars, a PG-02 panorama kit and their older Ultimate Omni-Pivot panorama, some macro gear and several camera plates.
Were Chamber's comments alone the reason Arca-Swiss changed the clamp? I doubt it. They get feedback from a lot of people. I know that I made comments directly to Rod Klukas and to Arca-Swiss's owners about needing better index marking on that clamp and got positive responses to my suggestions. Do I think they changed because of me? I doubt it, I'm sure I wasn't the only one.
As to whether to buy a slavish copy of the C1 or the C1: How do you need about patents, copyright, and other forms of intellectual property? If the Multiflex had some serious improvements to the C1 that would be one thing but the company that makes it didn't do that.