Probably there’s no particular reason for that algorithm be better than any of the others, and I would give them a try. In particular, if sticking to Powell’s methods is a reason per se, using the implementations in PRIMA is probably the way to go, as they have better performance and fixed bugs relative to older (Powell’s) implementations. Otherwise there is a great variety of derivative-free methods (in Julia and otherwise) to be experimented. Maybe this thread is a starting point to test alternatives.