OEM's, Cabs, clean or loaded? kitchen ?'s.
 

I'm really at a bit of a loss here..

what're the advantages to using OEM's on a kitchen install rather than using something like teir-autoinstall to install a bunch of cabs after installing a very basic rom?

What are the advantages to having a lean rom vs one with a lot of programs?

OEM's seem to me like they're no different aside from having the advantage that they're less of a pain to deal with when flashing - however, they also don't seem to be delete-able when a new version of a program comes out...

My biggest annoyance is my lack of ram, and need to re-customize all my apps when I flash the rom since OEM's are in the fresh-install state and my settings need adjusting again and again.

oems use up disk space so you have more storage space on your phone to use for ringtones/files/themes and such plus they give you the added ability to if your away from your computer without all your .cab installers when you have to do a hard reset for one reason or another you don't lose all those apps you may have to readjust some settings but you don't have to worry about reinstalling the apps themselves
of course that's just my take on it somebody else might have better reasons

Well, anything you load into your ROM space (ie: most OEMs) does NOT use your Program RAM space, however any cabs you install afterwards DOES take Program RAM space.

These devices have a limited ammount of space and it is devided (formated) into several drive like partitions. The ROM is one of those partitions, the more you install there, the less you have to install into other space (ram). You can only write to the ROM durring bootloader mode (flashing) so any space you do not use durring a flash is essentially wasted.

It doesn't help to install programs that get updated often into a rom because when you install an upgrade it can't delete the old files and settings the same as if the files were in the program RAM... -However you can typically install updates fine, they just install 'ghost' files on top of the ones in ROM they do however use up your program Ram and that update is typically perfectly uninstallable.

As far as having to set up yor software, you can use registry settings to more quicly set up most of your settings. It is not that simple, but if you are doing hard resets often (trying new roms etc) it will get you up and running after a hard reset much faster.

I hope this answers your questions.