I don't think there's a 'feel' about add-ons.
Maybe some believe it's a hassle? Although i think it's pretty easy.

If anything you can play without them for a couple of hours and see if you'd like anything added or changed.

If you check my characters, i have a ton of add-ons applied. Most if not all are quality of life add-ons that don't change gameplay, but make my playthrough smoother, for me at least. The most uh unobtrusive one being simply a visible clock.

I would say to go through the add-ons list and just read some of em that interest you. There are ratings as well.

If you want even more addons you can also check out my latest character(Alonra at the time of speaking). There is a lot of them but all of them are tested and working together.

Like ConJohnner I have some addons that are quality of life, like effects display or faster run/rest/explore but I also use many rebalancing addons that make some classes/races/items more interesting and fun (Arcanum, Verdant, Midnight are the biggest). I also use 2 addons that let me respec the charater talents anywhere and as many as I want and another that lets me unlock talent trees for free which some might consider cheating but I have them mainly for testing purposes (kind of quality of life too).

There are also many cool addons that add new classes to the game. IMO best of them are Deathknight, Dark Priest and Zephyr.

I've used the ZOmnibus pack of addons for so long, I basically consider them part of the base game at this point. Entirely just QoL stuff, but they add little things that make life easier.

I'm just getting into ToME and the addons.

The first one that I tried was tome-nullnewgems (thats the file name). It was so well done that it encouraged me to look further. From a novice's perspective, it seems that most of the addons are of very good quality.

I did reach a point where classes from addons that I'd not even tried yet started showing up on rares. And then beating me into a pulp. That might be fun later, but it got to be too much. After messing around for a while, I found a set of QOL plus a few classes that I prefer.

This is my addon protocol.
d/l everything that sounds interesting, immed put it into the game.
Start up the game and manually disable the new stuff in the addons dialog.
Then, before I start a new game - when I feel like it - I go back into the addons and enable them again.

I was editing the desc.lua file and all sorts of nonsense. This way is much easier and gives you exactly the control that you'll want.

... unintended duplicate post ... must be some temporal horror around.

The understanding I have with addons is that it's like speedrunning. If you want some big bragging rights, you run stock ToME, but obviously not everyone's drawn to that. (I should know, I tried in chat to describe the 9 circles of Mod Hell, with my game at circle 9.)

The "feel," at least as far as I understand it, is that you don't accomplishment brag if you do a lot of modding without disclosing it first. QoL mods usually don't affect much since people care about how difficult that supposed run of yours actually was, since I do recall someone a while back who basically ran god-mode mods and bragged about beating so much on the hardest difficulties.

Me personally, I swear by mods, and I'm the guy who'll try to call out junked steam mods, the ZOmnibus classpack creating issues once as well as the Fallen racial mod bugging out and reversing sanity gain/loss in this last update, both of which on the Steam releases, unless someone's updated them without my knowledge.