Quote Originally Posted by Hasin Haroon View Post
Craig, don't rule out a bevel up jack. It'll smooth just as well and also joint. In fact the one thing you might not be able to do at this point with a brand new BU jack is the rough work - you'd have to fiddle with cambering a thick blade to do that.
If you changed "it will smooth just as well" to "it will smooth well enough to get you up and running" then I'd completely agree.

Relying on a single iron sacrifices some important options/capabilities for managing tearout in difficult wood, so I don't think you can reasonably argue that it's equal to a double-iron bench plane for smoothing.