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?
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