Ah, helm-flx didn't exist when I quit helm, and flx-ido did. Question: does helm-flx sort results, or does it just throw back an unsorted list of matching entries, like normal helm? I consider the sorting an even bigger and more ridiculous drawback than the matching.

I haven't used helm-M-x. That may be better - but it doesn't solve the problem that everything else using completing-read is still on normal helm.

I typically use a small emacs window next to a terminal (or few - I don't run terminals in emacs) and browser in my tiling wm. Helm makes this nearly impossible, since it's very difficult to control where helm windows will go without using popwin (horrifically buggy) or shackle (I never tried this, as I'd already moved to ido by the time it showed up), because of helm's nonstandard way of doing things.

With regards to the bugginess, I can anecdotally say that I've seen more asking about problems with helm on the #emacs IRC channel than any other package - and there are several of equivalent popularity (magit, for instance). I also experienced numerous bugs while I was using helm, including some that broke my emacs config. The only package I've had break my config more than helm is org, but org generally works quite well if you can get it loaded without problems.