I’d buy winrar just because it has served me very well and all for free, for at least a decade even if I use mostly 7zip now. They earned that license fee
In this context (IIRC) smart means "if this zip contains a single folder with contents, directly extract that folder, but if the zip contains files and/or folders, extract all that to a new folder named the same as the zip file".
Some people zip folders while some people zip the files in a folder. Smart extraction just handles both automatically.
7zip doesn't work well with win11. Read somewhere that the developer refuses to do something about it, but no idea. Went with nanazip, which is derived from 7zip
Seems to. MB3 and you have Extract which does a folder name and places them in that, or Extract Here which puts all the files in your current directory