For the hobby beekeeper, a top bar hive makes an awful lot of sense and my bees are certainly happy in them and do well.
Start up costs of buying a Langstroth hive, frames, foundation, bees and beesuit and smoker and maybe even an extractor are in excess of £500. I have a neighbour who reckons that each jar of honey they get from their bees costs nearly a £100.
I can make a top bar hive out of scrap timber for under £10 and populate it with a swarm that costs me nothing, other than the time and effort to catch it. Don't need to feed them as swarms usually have a full belly of honey to get them started and the bees in a swarm are actually selected to be young and at a prime age for comb building, so they are all ready to start setting up home as soon as they have found a suitable cavity....All you have to do is make your hive into the most attractive cavity in the area, so that they accept it and stay put. Understanding what bees need and prefer and perhaps more importantly what they dislike, helps to achieve that.
I've kept bees for nearly 20 years and I started out with conventional framed hives like Langstrroths and only discovered top bar hives a few years ago. I still have my original hives and I like both types of hives for different reasons..... increased honey production in the framed hives and probably slightly easier to inspect....., better quality of life for the bees in TBH, cheap and easy to construct, no heavy lifting of 30lb+ boxes of honey as it's harvested a top bar at a time.... the wonder of "natural" comb built to whatever size and shape the bees need!.
If you go for a TBH I would strongly recommend you incorporate an observation window into the construction as it's a huge benefit and educational tool, especially in winter. If you are in a hot climate I would recommend a Kenyan TBH with sloping sides rather than a Tanzanian which is just a rectangular long box as there is less weight to top bar attachment in a slope sided one, so less likely to have comb collapse.
It's easy for people who have failures with Top Bar Hives to blame the hive or say that it's not suitable for their climate, but they can work in any climate if thought is given to the requirements of bees in their location. ie shade and insulation in a hot climate and not opening the hive during a heat wave. Insulation and shelter from prevailing winds in a cold climate and I prefer full sun in my location, as it never gets too hot.
You get less honey harvest in a top bar hive because the comb is usually destroyed in the harvesting process... ie cut off and crushed and strained whereas it is extracted in a framed hive and the empty combs put back to be refilled.... that comb takes energy to rebuild and energy uses honey. Also in a top bar hive, drone (male bee) production is not suppressed and drones eat honey but don't produce it, so that also reduces the amount available for the beekeeper.
Personally I'm not happy with the current state of farming where creatures are pushed to the limits of production and beyond. Commercial beekeeping is no different. As a hobby beekeeper, if you want more honey, build more hives and keep more bees and plant nectar rich plants, rather than push the bees in one hive to be more productive than is natural. I guess that's the same reason many of us keep chickens.... because we are not comfortable with commercial practices.
Anyway, that's my 2pennies worth of thoughts on Top Bar Hives vs Conventional framed hives.
I'm rather excited at the moment because I'm going to a skep beekeeping workshop next month. It would be nice to add a couple of those to my garden apiary.
Pleased to report that all 9 of my colonies have survived the winter so far again, even the tiny one that was a late cast swarm and only had a couple of pounds of stores tops. They are amazingly hardy and thrifty little beasties. Hoping for an early spring, so they don't have to hang in there too much longer.