I ran Savage Tide in 5E for two separate groups. One was in person at a game store, the second was on roll20. The in person group got to about 14th level when you confront Vanthus in Divided's Ire, while the roll20 group went all the way to the conclusion. The first group lasted about a year and a half, the second one (that completed the path) was two years. At the time I ran it, about three years ago, Wizards hadn't put out their extra bestiaries yet, so I had to use a converter to get from 3.5 to 5E for some of the monsters.
For things that worked, the players loved their ship. When the shipwreck happens upon arriving at the Isle of Dread, they were sad as if a PC had died and didn't want to leave it behind. It is also easy to make the characters hate Vanthus if you let someone see a boat sailing away from the pirate's cove in "Bullywug's Gambit" and reveal it was him. Rowen from the first adventure garnered the player's sympathy simply because of how much she hated Vanthus. Later in the adventure path, the players were excited to befriend lots of "bad guys", running quests for the bullywug lich in "Into the Maw", sipping tea with Malcanthet, Red Shroud, and Tyrlandi made their day. There are a few moral choices that came up that the players enjoyed. In "Lightless Depths" there was delicious tension between releasing the aboleths against the kopru with one group, while the other questioned working with Nurt/Lynarra knowing full well they weren't an innocent gnome.
There were a few things that didn't work for me. Playing in a store for only three hours once a week meant I had to skip a lot of the hexcrawling in "Tides of Dread." Instead, we just ran a random encounter on the way to each encounter area. If I had accurately tracked time and movement, the game would've been weeks and weeks of random encounters with dinosaurs interspersed with completing one goal. I had one group that refused to leave Zotzilaha's treasure hoard alone, and ended up getting cursed for stealing from it and rushing to "City of Broken Idols" before going through "Lightless Depths." Another group got heavily invested in freeing Scuttlecove from tyranny, and spent a lot of time trying to clear the entire city of evil influence. They thought it was part of the adventure, and were surprised they were meant to go elsewhere to the pirate hideout.
The two biggest problems I had were related to how 5E breaks down as a system above tenth level, and the burnout on fiends in the last third of the campaign. Vanthus went down like a chump in "Tides of Dread" as did Demogorgan in "Prince of Demons". There's a chance for a random encounter in "Into the Maw" with a balor and I don't think he did one point of damage before being dropped. The group didn't have fantastic magical items either, the only weapon I gave out with a +X bonus was the artifact bow in "City of Broken Idols." I tried to counter this by giving named and important boss baddies max HP so they'd last more than one round. There was also a tension of tiptoeing between being courteous to demon lords while simultaneously knowing they were strong enough to fight them (seriously, the demon lords in 5E are pretty weak).
As to the second point, the last four issues of the path, an entire third, take place almost exclusively in the lower planes, with the majority of them being in the Abyss. The players began to feel some serious burnout on fighting yet more demons.