[Droid Incredible Q&A, Help & Troubleshooting] bluesmantj:
OK, so I know... lousy first post... But, I just want a bit of overall guidance because I think I might be doing something fundamentally wrong and I'm hoping to fix that. So first let me say thanks for all the awesome ROMS and lot of cool fixes and ideas, I always check here first and appreciate the work you guys are doing!

I have had no fear in installing ROMs, I rooted as soon as my warranty was void at verizon. I love my old DInc! But, I can only install like 20 total apps now, and I think I've done something wrong or am doing something wrong.

Here's the history of what I've been doing.

Stock, Virtuous, CM6, CM7.2, CM7.2... It was here where I started to run into the low memory. All the forms said for this I should ext4all the dalvik cache. so I grabbed that file and installed it. The memory warning went away, but things got really ugly choppy and slow with a bunch of FC's. So I decided to change things up, and went to try an ICS ROM (I think albinoman) and installed a couple times... and I didn't wipe the dalvik cache before doing this. though I did wipe the factory data and cache. After this I noticed that a lot of things remained on my phone (wifi passwords, pictures, etc... like I hadn't erased any data). Soon after finding some bugs that drove me crazy, I upgraded to a CarbonRom (Thanks zachf714!) I loved it, but it seemed like I couldn't install as much as I used to on CM7.2... and maybe I can't... But I'd run into low memory things again and again, and eventually got it down to basically google apps, facebook, and a couple podcast/radio and the essential video apps for chromecast. Well, I wanted to try kit kat out, and I had started to run out of memory again, so I went in and grabbed the new CM11 and installed it, This time I wiped dalvik, factory data, and cache before install. It was amazing like a brand new phone... Only this time 2 of my previous apps were unable to install because I had "insufficient storage available". So I pushed as much as I could to the SD card, and that still didn't help eventually it was so out of space that the launcher would crash immediately after reboot. So I tried to reinstall everything, wiped all three, installed the rom, ext4all, then GAPPS... This time facebook ran out of space before it could even install. So I went back and tried again but without the ext4all... and now facebook and google voice run out of space before I can get htem installed...

So I guess the question is, what the heck am I doing wrong in my clear? I seem to constantly be shrinking the available space on my phone for apps. I know that it's a limited thing and has been a problem for the DInc, but how do I fix this? Do I just go into the file system and start rm-rf in the file structure? I don't even have (nor can I try) to install games at this point, and I fear logging into apps in fear that I'll shrink the space even more. And by all means feel free to point me to the "installing a custom ROM, You're doing it wrong!" thread that is in front of my nose and I'm missing. I've got 5Gb of space on my SD and ~3GB of free space on the phone itself... So I'm at a loss and that's why it's acting this way, and that's why I'm asking for help. Would I be better off going back to CM7.2 or trying to keep going with the newer ROMS?

Thanks again for any help and advice you have.