I think the thing with autos is that for example zkittles auto is not a zkittlez that happens to autoflower, but its zkittlez crossed with an autoflower and then they look for phenos that resemble the original zkittlez. But the common trend with autos seems to not stabilise them enough and you get tons of pheno variations, so even if there might be some that resemble original zkittlez, there most likely are also phenos that dont resemble it. Often the auto breeders have one or few breeding autos, for example sativaish, hybrid and indica dom and they always use these or some hybrids bred from these to make new strains.
So yea auto zkittlez is not zkittlez and i think its silly how they advertise strains as if they would be exact copies of the photo versions..
Some autos are crap, some are as good as good photos, but those are rare, usually its something in between.
I used to grow autos over 10 years ago when i used to grow a bit(before recently starting again) and i used low ryder #1 x photo hybrids bred by amateur breeders. And now that i have grown bit over 10 commercial autoflowers, not many commercial strains seem much better than some low ryder #1 pollen tossed around..
Mephisto seems good and they breed autos especially and not try to false advertise some auto versions of photos, which i dig. Many seem to try to make auto versions of what ever is popular at photo side of things and basically never get forwards with their breeding as well as being a dedicated auto breeder like mephisto. Fast buds seems like a lot of hype, not very cheap, quality varies and plants dont generally seem very big, but are on the small/medium side, even tho they are supposed to be huge yielders.. But they seem to pack some punch, even if the plants are not that big. Would fit to a small grow setup, but in general too much hype and i also got 2 hermies out of 3 once and the third one i did not pop because fuck hermieshit.