Actually the Prolexic product is one of the most innovative and effective one we've seen to date. DDoS attacks are not a commodity issue, you have to pay to play..Not sure how that makes Akamai horrible..
I can confirm that Akamai is a pain to deal with. Defense.Net as well. Cloudflare is what I would chose but they are siding with the Chinese gov't at this point.
Not sure what you're basing that statement on. Cloudflare very recently gave support to various parties involed in the pro-democracy movement in Hong Kong. They claimed to have weathered the largest DDoS in history in the process.
