In what way do you find it too chatty? That hasn't been my experience, but I do use a pretty small subset of it. Are you using it on its own, or with helm/ivy?
It could have been hel or ivy I was seeing. I don’t like the mode line moving (growing the minibuffer) as I typically keep my eyes on part of the buffer and don’t want anything moving (or worse, obscuring where I’m looking)