The Briggs ELS engine is offered on two Scag machines, the Freedom Z and Tiger Cat. They are two very different machines. I have a 26 HP Briggs ELS engine on my Scag Tiger Cub and I am pleased with it and it now has about 400 hours. The Tiger Cub has evolved into the Tiger Cat. I have a collection system on my machine and this causes lots of dust around the rear of the machine during operation and I have to replace air filters often and do oil changes sooner than usual. Other engine options have the two stage particle separating air filter installed on them. This option is not offered on the Briggs ELS engines. Had I known this I would have selected another model with an engine that had this type of air filter. Briggs now offers a Professional series engine with a particle separating air filtration system. Scag offers this engine on their latest Freedom Z machine however I haven't seen one yet at my local Scag dealer, info about it is on the Scag website.
When my engine had about 40 hours on it the fuel and oil consumption settled down indicating that the engine had gotten past the breakin period.
The ELS is a decent engine. But ... As with most things in life, you have to provide a frame of reference when you ask a question. I cannot give you a "yes or no" answer because you need to better define what your "needs" are for the mower.
Are you doing commercial mowing, with the intent of being in dusty places often, with long operational duty cycles? I would contend you need as much mower as you can afford, including high-end air filtration and possibly liquid cooling. If you have the expectation of a rough lawn, the TigerCat is built very heavy duty. (Example: I have the former Tiger Cub which morphed into the Cat. I use it for personal home mowing, but I have a very rough yard because I live in the country and it was formerly a large cow pasture before it was my homestead. I chose an air-cooled KAW with the multi-stage air filtration. My mowing cycles are reasonably short at about two hours per week, but the dust can be bad at times, and the lawn is rough. Hence, I need a strong chassis, good air-filters, but don't need liquid cooling).
If you're doing a personal estate mowing job, and only going to use it occasionally for perhaps several hours a week, with a low-dust exposure, then I see the ELS engine being a perfectly viable option that will last you a very long time. Also, the Freedom is not quite as heavily built (as far as I can tell) as the up-scale models. A "normal" well-manicured lawn would present no issues to this chassis, but rought stuff would perhaps beat it up a bit over time.
Like about everything else, there is a choice of tools for every application. First analyze your needs, then narrow down your choices.
