I didn't have issues with compe until I started using snippets, at which point I needed to manually modify the lua code that they provide for you (to own and maintain yourself) for tab completion. I had to spend a fair amount of time getting the right compe - snippet provider setup that would populate correctly.

Once I added snippets and modified the completion code, the ability to hit "Enter" to select an autocompletion selection broke and I couldn't manage to fix it without preventing the key from entering a newline in insert mode. I ended up just remapping it to a new key. But even then, it's still a little quirky- if I type some text and hit tab expecting to add some spacing, I'd instead get prompted for autocomplete suggestions I wasn't looking for.

I get that all this is fun for some people, but I just want sane defaults that work like VS code.

I have a question. Once you hit the tab and get a list of completion items through either completion-nvim or nvim-compe, how do you further narrow down the list? All I can do is cycle through items or match by prefix, but I want further narrowing by matching substring/regex/flex anywhere in the items à la Ivy/Helm from Emacs (or any of the so many completion systems available in Emacs).

Last I used it it was often missing completion candidates https://github.com/hrsh7th/nvim-compe/issues/248 which was extremely frustrating but apparently hard to fix