Sorry to hear of your 617 issues. Mine has been great out of the box. S&W will fix it and then you will love the critter.

I shoot Fed AutoMatch. I have shot over a case (about 4000) and had only one failure to fire. I rotated the cartridge and it fired. Maybe the priming compound was not evenly distributed.

Here is mine with a cheap green dot. I had to monkey with the cheap sight a bit at first but it has worked well since and holds zero. It would probably not survive the wet or high recoil but fine for this application. I use Burris FastFire on heavy recoil handguns.