[rcxdude]

This is my experience as well. The average quality in ROS is rock-bottom and so while it contains all of the things you might want from a robotics framework, you pay dearly for it. I would also say that whole the concept of distributed network modes is a convenient one for robotics development, stringing your control loops through such a structure is a recipe for disaster and should be avoided in your system design as much as possible (and one of the problems with ROS as a framework is that it heavily encourages this)