ROM questions

[stemo76]

Recently moved from a treo to the xv6800 on the Verizon network and have been reading through this form and the XDA-Developers forum trying to catchup on all the upgrades, mods and options. Verizon sales told me that the GPS is available and google maps and MS live search would work with it. I almost took the phone back till I did some searches and found these great sites.

A couple of basic questions that I have not found the answers to.

I see dcd and nueROM are the most commonly talked about custom ROMs on these forum. I see updated versions but don't easily find whats different/improved/fixed. Maybe I just haven't found the right page.

Without that I don't really know which is right for me. After locking my verizon phone to the sprint network last week I want to be more careful this go around.

Why would a Non Sprint user use the Sprint ROM (without customization) instead of a custom rom from dcd or nueROM? Maybe all the hype on this forum is from Sprint users that can now get previously custom ROM features in a carrier authorized ROM?

Is the only advantage of a kitchen over a ROM the ability to add apps at time of update or are there features that can only be updated through a kitchen as opposed to a base rom and then .CAB files? with the invent of the user customization does that replace the need for kitchens?