I have tried the following:
dooderbutt AOSP v1, v5, v6
vhgomez r1, r1.3, r2.5.1
oICS (some of the earlier versions)
Crossbones
Bugless Beast r1/18/2012
The ROM that was on my phone the longest was dooderbutt. I found that with Matr1x kernel and dooderbutt, I had a fast and stable phone with good battery life. The only thing that didn't work was GPS.
vhgomez r1 and r1.3 were great, but not as fast as dooderbutt and the GPS didn't work for me. For some reason, r2.5.1 didn't work well at all on my phone, so I quickly removed it. It was sluggish. The music player randomly skipped songs, the colors would flicker. GPS didn't work either.
Crossbones was a disaster on my phone.
I just installed bugless beast with Matr1x, and it is running very smoothly. GPS works and it locks quickly! I just calibrated and will be testing it over the next couple of days to see whether it works as well or better than dooderbutt v5/6 for me.
Bottom line: give multiple ROMs a test drive. It's a learning experience and can be fun to see the differences. These developers work hard to push these out, and I think we need to give them feedback. It's the least we can do for taking their hard work and using it.