you will solder the adapter in and the decoder plugs in, its good for quick removal if needed, but for amall engines the extra hardware just gets in the way. BEMF is the key for good slow speed performance. If you have one of their decoders and its doing the herky jerky as mentioned above, poking with the BEMF controls should fix it.
I am not a fan of the kick start, if you need that your model has issues, not the decoder.