[8525, TyTN, MDA Vario II, JasJam ROM Development] surrept:
Agreed. Although....

The idea of having to install a ton of cabs after a flash is quite sucky. For me the solution is "settings savior". You can find it on here if you do a search. The latest version worked like a charm for me. So much easier to stick all my cabs in the programs install directory on a storage card and have it go through the installs 1 by 1 without me having to click on each cab file and do it that way. Not to mention it keeps all my settings for sound/buttons etc.

It seems this way you get the benefit of both quick and easy reflash/cab installs along with the ability to add/remove/change programs. Plus since Matt says not having them preinstalled to the windows programs directory keeps the bloat down you also get the benefit of a speedier device.

I've been through I dunno, 10-15+ different roms over the course of the last 6 months and done quite a bit of reading on this forum. One thing people seem to lose focus of on this forum is stability/speed while having exactly and I mean exactly what you want on it with no extras. There are so many frickin roms out there and most of them are flawed in some way or another. Whether it be missing one simple feature like internet sharing or having way too many features. One thing that is a given is that no matter what rom anyone chooses, there is always going to be more software that you need to install to make the device work for you. And most of the roms have so much software already preinstalled that once you get your software installed on top of that things inevitably slow down.

I mean how many people have used just 1 cooked rom and stuck with it. From all the reading I would say probably very little. This tells me most people are unhappy with at least 1 feature on the roms they use otherwise there would be no need to switch. It seems it would be to the benefit of everyone if we just stuck with base naked roms and used a program like settings savior to install custom cab packages that people could put together along with their settings. This way you have the ability to take a nearly perfect cab package and tweak it exactly to your liking by removing what you don't want and adding what you do want keeping bloat down.

I tried almost every rom from the rom benchmark thread with all of my software installed exactly the same way on each. And absolutely none of them are as fast and stable as this rom with my stuff on it. Even the super duper crazy ultra hyper fast lite versions don't compare. The closest rom to this one for my needs was the hypercore lite SE version and that rom has netframe 2.0 installed which means 3.5 would be installed along with it rather than all by its lonesome self thus preventing me from obtaining the 20% speed increase that you can get by having 3.5 by itself. (at least thats what I read it gives you when installed without 3.5)

Anyway I realize this was a long rant and I don't mean to crap on all the rom cookers out there. If it wasn't for you guys I would have never ended up with the perfect rom. I'm just tired from all the rom switches I've done trying to come up with a perfect rom. Figured I'd give my 2 cents on the subject. Thanks again Matt for keeping me sane by allowing me to never have to switch again.