An old grudge: i actually love KDE Plasma, but rely on a plethora of remote Samba shares for work.
Gnome/gvfs makes it so easy to integrate them in the file picker/nautilus and performance is great. On KDE kio (or whatever that is called now) always caches a copy first, which takes forever and prevents many applications from writing to the files correctly.
I'd love to be using KDE again. Is there anything I can do to get better/faster/more reliable samba access?
I've not really used samba in dolphin as I find it more reliable to just have systemd handle automounting all filesystems as it allows other programs to access the locations
I've not noticed any performance issues using it this way, tho I only use a few shares on my local network
Not the most elegant solution but you can always just install nautilus. Nothing is keeping you from using apps from both DEs except a little extra work getting the theme set