I'm very confused by some of the posts on this thread. You guys seem to have a different stock keyboard than I do. My stock Samsung keyboard on my Tmobile Note 3 absolutely allows you to long press for punctuation. What OS are you guys running? I'm on 4.4.2 stock and just bought my phone last week so never saw if the Jellybean keyboard was any different.
Also, you can turn off predictive text and auto complete in the settings for those that don't like it. I keep it on myself but for the people who mentioned not liking it, just turn it off.
I have tried the following keyboards on this phone: Samsung, Google, SwiftKey, Swype, Flex T9. The Samsung stock keyboard is my favorite. I love having the number row up top. The swipe typing works greats for me - better than the other keyboards. The handwriting with the SPen is surprisingly accurate for me. The other keyboards either don't have a handwriting function or the one that touts that it does, functioned abysmally for me personally (that may depend on your writing style but it only got one word out of 100 for me and the 99 wrong ones were gibberish, not even close).
Anyway, I'm not trying to talk anyone into using the stock keyboard - use whichever you like best of course - but I'm just surprised that the comments here sound like some of you are using a completely different stock keyboard than I have or haven't gone into the settings at all (or maybe your settings are different if there was a different kb on jellybean)?