> That's not true. Helm doesn't just insert .asterisk, which is why it supports out of order matching. If one searches for "file rename" Helm will find rename-file, while typing "filerename" in ido it will not find it. In ido one would have to do "filerename"
I did forget it supports out-of-order matching, my apologies. Still, it does use a strange, difficult-to-use form of matching, and does not sort the results by default.
I use flx-ido, which supports out-of-order matching to some degree. This is not a knock on helm, as helm (now) has helm-flx, but nevertheless I consider ido's default much better than helm's, as ido at least sorts the results.
> Helm is already criticized by many ido fans for having too many features, now it's also criticized by ido fans for not having more (despite it having way more than ido).
I may have made this point badly, but it's not about features, it's about letting me use those features the way I want. I don't recall the exact discussion, as this was over a year ago, but I asked for the ability to change a specific default and was told "that's the wrong way to do it" - and I'm not the only one who's recounted something like that happening in the project. That's unacceptable for something I use in Emacs - I want to be able to change anything.
> ido is not changing, and most extensions to it are very hacky.
ido does everything I need it to, and works seamlessly with every package I've tried it with. If its extensions are hacky, I haven't noticed - my ido config has literally never broken, whereas when I used helm I dealt with things breaking constantly, and not because of the introduction of grand new features. I don't mind bugs due to newness; I greatly dislike bugs that are due to doing things in a non-standard, difficult-to-customize manner, combined with a lack of care towards not breaking things, which has been my experience with helm.
Helm has a lot more features. That's certainly true. A lot of those features are ones I wished I could have in ido. But in nearly every other aspect helm is significantly deficient, often pointlessly so. Helm had to have extra work put in in order to use custom non-standard windowing functions - extra work that makes the package significantly worse, IMO.
FWIW, I don't mean to say your response is wrong, and I don't mind that people use helm (I use helm a little, though only when I have to). If you can get helm working, and you like it, that's great. I just don't want new users to get disillusioned with emacs because of how finicky and frustrating helm can be - as I mentioned in another comment, I see more people in the #emacs IRC channel having problems with helm than with any other package. Helm is often proselytized without much warning about the issues I listed - I almost quit Emacs when helm, one of its "star packages" according to most Emacs bloggers, caused me so many problems.