While I see that as a strength it might be a double edged sword. I installed a few packages I thought were necessary and soon Atom was crashing constantly and was riddled with bugs. I think it's possible that too many people have the ability to control core pieces of what makes Atom so good and as a result the experience degrades.
The inverse also applies. Take Chrome/Chromium where the extensions are generally powerless against core components, making the whole browser useless for decent customization.
