  One of the most serious problems of the staggered fermion lattice action is
flavor symmetry violation. Smeared link staggered fermions can improve flavor
symmetry by an order of magnitude relative to the standard thin link action.
Over the last few years different smearing transformations have been proposed,
both with perturbatively and non-perturbatively determined coefficients. What
hindered the acceptance and more general use of smeared link fermions until now
is the relative difficulty of dynamical simulations and the lack of
perturbative calculations with these actions. In both areas there have been
significant improvement lately, that I will review in this paper.
