Reminds me of an old JWZ's quote: "Every program attempts to expand until it can read mail. Those programs which cannot so expand are replaced by ones which can."
I think all Opera's extra goodies are good only if you expect 75% of functionalities. E.g. Opera Chat still don't support encoding fallback (X-chat, IRSSI, mIRC, etc. does), or it is not very obvious to disable the built-in BitTorrent client (disable it in `about:config` by yourself), Opera Link that only merge two bookmarks together, requiring me to manually delete all default bookmarks before (or after) syncing, etc.
But it is a really good browser: fast, has minimum resource usage. I wish there is Opera Lite. (And hope Opera team to finally fix Asian language support.)
I agree, if you go for dedicated clients (irc, mail, rss) you will get more power/functionality if you need them; but I feel that in Opera I get the optimal balance between functionality and complexity. To each his own.
Still, I don't understand what benefits are to explicitly disabling Opera's built-in torrent client; why not use something else?
Opera always override default torrent application on my machine. I found it to be easier to just disable Opera's built-in BitTorrent than changing back the default every few days. I wish they have this simple "Use Opera to handle BitTorrent" checkbox in the Preferences.
Firefox is dead slow if you add all the needed functionality build in Opera and Chrome doesn't have much going for it (speed-wise check the benchmarks; and Opera is very responsive when I keep my 50+ tabs open, whereas Chrome cannot handle the load, freezes the computer and uses a huge amount of memory).
Oh, by the way, the Opera default is "restore previous session" and it does not close all your tabs when you close the browser so you are encouraged to have one continuous browsing experience; I've been keeping some tabs open for years.
Just a sneak peek.