[Sprint HTC EVO 4G LTE] remotephone:
My experience has varied. I started with Cyanogenmod 10.something, Dirty Unicorns, moved to 11, tried the chat room early releases, and now I am upgrading nightlies every few days whenever something interesting in the changelogs shows up. I know this thread is specifically about the 12-17-13, but your question seems more general and all these issues were apparent in that release and the latest release I got from the chatroom, the 1-17-14.

Issues I have experienced:

-Battery life seems to drain quickly when I am surfing and using the device, up to 20 percent an hour, but I am very heavy user and downloader, it just didnt seem to drain that quickly with the stock rom, but I don't have any science to prove this. Relatedly, I have incredible standby battery life once I did all the little battery fixes I found in a thread around here I can't seem to locate now, usually around 2 or 3 percent.

-Random reboots don't seem to happen as much, though I had 2 with the 1/25/14 nightly over the course of 3 or 4 days (edit: Actually 2 now that i look at a calendar). The 1-17-14 also did not have a lot of random reboots

-My biggest problem is the radios switching back and forth, and I have heard this is seen on all 4.4 builds or at least hasnt been fixed on this particular phone. If my phone moves out of range of an access point and 3g/4g tries to kick in, often times it will show progress and connection but no data will transfer. I have to manually disable and enable the radio and even then manually reconnect or rescan to the SSID a few times before it works. I am running the latest batch of radios and all that. I have searched repeatedly but have not found a solution to this problem. Some people recommend toggling airport mode which works about 80 percent of the time, but still its a pain in the ass. This is the one reason I am considering going back to stock and waiting for 4.3 OTA or just going with cyanogenmod 10.2.

-Additionally, wifi doesn't always wake up right. I have seen this happen a few times and heard some references to ATT/2wire routers being involved somehow, but I haven't found anything definitive (i do have an AT&T router). I often see association rejected messages and sometimes it just wont connect until I manually disable and enable the wifi and rescan a few times. Less than awesome.

-Upgrading through nightlies has made a difference for me. I have seen improvements come even when I upgraded after only 3 or 4 days, but I've been paying attention to changelogs for changes that I want to see. Bluetooth improved with a recent upgrade, unexpected reboots have declined dramatically (i was seeing a few every day with some earlier nightlies)

As for you, I would avoid this particular rom and the nightlies, get one of the cyanogenmod 10.2 stables or just hold on to a stock phone as 4.3 is coming very soon.

edit again - I reread my post and think i came across as more negative than I meant to be. This rom is generally really good, I don't think this phone is seeing a lot of problems that other phones aren't, and android 4.4 has some really awesome features and tweaks (ie, the lockscreen music preview/control widget is my favorite). If you were using this phone as something to tinker with and to try new things on, this rom is tip-top. If you want something that "just works," I think cm10.2 is closer to where you wanna be. also, a million thanks to the developers on this, i wouldn't even get to complain about these things if they hadn't put their time into it.