"Do people believe that having access to packages and add-ons makes an editor (or whatever else) "bloated and slow"?"
... no? Hate to dismiss your entire message that way (I mean that seriously), but...
People appear to be assuming a great deal more universality than I could possibly have implied, since I don't believe it's a universal problem anyhow, and never addressed scope. It's just a cycle that definitely exists in some domains.
It's gotten to when I see something described as "minimal" I tend to just roll my eyes and move on. Especially when combined with accusations, veiled or otherwise, that something else is "bloated", which at this point I tend to just assume is a meaningless feeling word with no real technical content. Yes, that includes when used in the context of "cycle of bloat"; this is a cycle endlessly recurring, yet has very little technical content. Mature text editors are, to a first approximation, all the same. (Yeah, there's some differences, but, meh.)
Well I hate to also semi-dismiss your message, BUT when certain add-ons are essential to using a tool like Atom it makes it slow and bloated.
For example I use vim, and when I tried Atom I threw on two Haskel add-ons and my system was unusable. Then I removed the add ons and my 7 year old desktop on OpenSUSE just lagged away. I than went to my other old desktop all in one and that lagged away just at typing (This was a month ago) and adding anything to Atom slowed down so much that typing was lagging let alone any feature.
... no? Hate to dismiss your entire message that way (I mean that seriously), but...
People appear to be assuming a great deal more universality than I could possibly have implied, since I don't believe it's a universal problem anyhow, and never addressed scope. It's just a cycle that definitely exists in some domains.
It's gotten to when I see something described as "minimal" I tend to just roll my eyes and move on. Especially when combined with accusations, veiled or otherwise, that something else is "bloated", which at this point I tend to just assume is a meaningless feeling word with no real technical content. Yes, that includes when used in the context of "cycle of bloat"; this is a cycle endlessly recurring, yet has very little technical content. Mature text editors are, to a first approximation, all the same. (Yeah, there's some differences, but, meh.)