Well - I still wish I had bought the non XS version, but it has its uses. I find that with extremely soft soaps (such as Marduk by AYLM), it's easier to have a very soft brush, and the XS horse works very well with that. Also, I kinda got used to it being soft and floppy - we'll see on the 1st of September how I'm dealing with a more normal brush.
But the brush itself has held up well: no tangling of the bristles, and for now no visible splitting of the hair either (even though with the fanning out of the knot, something somewhere must have changed).