I gave my daughter's 5'5" x 20 x 2.5 (42L) Catch Surf/Odysea RNF a go yesterday for the first time. I surfed for almost four hours earlier in the morning on my 5'8 CI NB2 (Varial) and had some some decent waves, so I didn't feel obliged to bring a good board down for a family beach day to cook in a bag.
I was pretty shocked how terrible the thing rode. I wasn't expecting to do blow tails or reverses, but thought I could thread the crowd and have fun in the waist-to-chest high increasingly onshore slop. The 50/50 foil on the twin fins really add to poop riding magic. Everything you don't want in a board is there: slow (check), boggy (check), heavy (check), tracky (check).
My only other experience with a shorter softboard (we have an obligatory Wavestorm) is a 4'11 INT Blackball-Beater that I won about six years ago. That board has a hard bottom and Futures boxes. I put some Pro Teck fins in to minimize the chance of injury when my daughter would use it. While the INT is no performance machine, I could still look like I could surf, but obviously handicapped by the craft. The RNF had me seriously flailing in comparison. The high point out of about eight waves was a low speed bank of the whitewater which was a struggle in itself.
I came in and was promptly mocked by my 13 year old, doing various impressions of rolling up the windows and general kookery, which my wife and friends took great delight in, fueled by their White Claw and/or IPA intake.
The softboard boom is pretty crazy, with the vast majority of people out on these type of boards after 10:00 am at my local beach in Redondo. On one hand, I'm all for it since it takes the danger factor down a few notches, but it also makes me wonder what percentage of the kids (relative to my almost 49 years) on these things know how much they're limiting themselves performance-wise.
I have newfound appreciation for some of the surfing I've seen on video on these type of boards. For me, it was struggle-bus time.