a place for everything
Long ago (ok, it was about 9 years ago), I worked as a laborer on a rebuild of the exterior of a building with a dryvit exterior. The biggest problem is that this building is in Alaska, and the facade we were replacing faces into all of our fall/winter storms, so it had weathered significantly since installation (to say the least).
To make matters worse, the building was a high school, where teenage kids (aka vandals) tend to congregate. Dryvit is so weak, and the concrete layer over it so thin, that dozens, if not hundreds, of students had stuck pens/pencils through the concrete and the foam backing. This essentially turned the entire facade into a matrix of waterlogged swiss cheese on steel studs--which rusted out entirely.
Of course, we were hired to tear out the existing dryvit, the trashed styrofoam backing, and the steel studs, and then to replace them with exactly the same thing we had just removed.
My foreman said it best: "I wouldn't use this stuff on my ex-wife's mother's house."
It may work in the south, and it may work where kids aren't poking sharp objects into it every day of every year, but it sure didn't work for a high school in Alaska. Vinyl may be ugly, but at least it will stand up to a teenager with a #2 pencil.