Interesting, my own experience has been the opposite. From what I remember v1 was constantly broken, initial v2 was not much better but now everything is very smooth all the time.

I had the same experience. The first AirDrop worked about 30% of the time, once AirDropv2 came along it works 90% of the time.

The "Share Only With Your Contacts" option still seems broken to me, I usually have to temporarily allow all access before AirDropping something.

AirDrop 1 never worked for me, ever. With any combination of iOS or MacOS devices.

AirDrop 2 is still so finicky I just much rather put stuff on a USB key.

I had massive issues with Airdrop 2 when it first came out. After many lengthy chats with Apple support it managed to resolve itself. All I can offer and a working solution is signing out and back into iCloud on each affected device. This of course comes with the resync penalty.