My Experiments:
- Cataclysm ROM
- AOKP
- AOSPA
- CM11
- Stock with Xposed
- Cataclysm with Xposed
- Franco
- ElementalX
For me, most important was stability+battery life, and I would say, best was stock+Xposed+Franco. But then, franco has got some bugs with headphones noise with his latest r34 and camera and memory leaks issues so ditched that setup. Previously used cataclysm+Xposed+Franco and I think that was the best setup for me ever. There were some problems like after a reboot the navigation buttons size was coming back to 100% , before I had it to 70% and ofc as cataclysm's dev is stopped so no bugs fix. Ditched that aswell. Tried ElementalX with stock/cataclysm and lovely setup as well , great performance but not much of battery life. Ditched that aswell. Then comes CM11 and with their shitty CAF patches, franco wouldn't work. I would say AOKP was really nice with their full kitkat themed white/grey theme. They had much features as well but being a flashaholic , ditched it and started checking more options. Now I'm with AOSPA , flashed it just yesterday. Keeping myself away from franco/Xposed for now to see what performance this ROM has and what it will give after applying franco's kernel to it. AOSPA is good and pie is delicious but many many features are still not merged, though I trust on PA team and surely they will give more features ahead. That why it's called "Development". I have tried like tons of mods as well. Candyshop at XDA is just amazing, and many other headphone/speakers mods. Franco's display color app/FKU is amazing aswell. I have one more mod , i.e Motorola Gallery, it's amazing and so much better than the old-school Gallery which Google gives, I'm sure Google will ditch it aswell in near future.