I agree that Differential, the Phabricator code review application, does not handle patch sets with hundreds of files or many thousands of lines of well. They don't optimize for that case much because they believe in smaller changes [0].

I think the local patch problem you are experiencing is due to the way the author submitted their diff. Normally if you want to locally try code you run "arc patch D123" and it will create a branch off that revision and apply the patch for you. If you look at this review [1] you see it has a link to the repository "Repository rP Phabricator", and in the "Revision Update History" and "Local Commits" sections it has direct links to the base and parent commits. If the submitter based their diff off non-published commits this won't work.

You can also reduce the need to directly pull down code by integrating a CI tool, code coverage information, and screenshots into your review process. All of those Phabricator supports.

[0] https://secure.phabricator.com/book/phabflavor/article/recom...

[1] https://secure.phabricator.com/D15358