Pidgin doesn't have a non-"highly experimental" OMEMO plugin yet and Gajim has major issues e.g. changes to privacy preferences silently failing. A lot of people I know are still on OTR.
Pidgin is quite simply a terrible XMPP client with none of the features of modern XMPP. I haven't had any issues with OMEMO with my contacts on Gajim.
Well I can believe that Gajim+OMEMO works, but I didn't trust it to setup an account after noticing the undesirable defaults in preferences->advanced->privacy then realising that unticking them had no effect (they're reticked when I open the preferences again).
Thanks, I did have a look at dino-im recently and was surprised it has no options at all - just a 'set up account' wizard that doesn't offer proxy settings before making connections. It wouldn't let me add a fake@127.0.0.1 account because it couldn't connect...
I'll have a dig in the conf files, perhaps I can configure an account manually.