Yea I typically don't mind when it's a few people, unless I'm in a public instance and theres quite a lot of people in the world, then I have to start blocking very poor avatars to save my frames
How do y'all care about the Avatar's peformance ranking?
Is it something you aim for, or is it something you completely disregard?
VRChat is free, so it is worth a shot to give it a try. VRChat actually does not require a VR Headset to play (though it definitely helps), so you can try it for yourself if you like.
VRChat does unfortunately suffer a lot of unsupervised children and other people who causes a nuisance being in public instances. So finding people to add to your friends list or finding groups to join private instance is the key to having a good experience.
My opinion on EAC is that it sucks, but there isn't a viable competitor platform that offers the same features and the large playerbase. I think that the program experience has gotten way better for me, due from the pressure to add proper features ever since there was massive backlash of EAC.
I unfortunately cannot comment on any other headset since I use an oculus headset as my primary PCVR headset