What is the rationale behind playing completely stock?

[Superfluous J]

It's a tradeoff. It's true that some suspense is lost when you make a node and can easily determine if you have enough fuel to execute it, but at the same time I find little satisfaction in starting a multi-hour mission that is mathematically excluded from success before I press the spacebar. It's not a particularly gratifying way to fail (there's no explosion, the ship just goes inert), and you don't discover it until near the end and can only start from the beginning again.

100% this.

Also, it's not like knowing the dV of your ship makes you immune to failure. I screw up all the time when I have plenty of fuel to get home. I also frequently run out of fuel even though in the VAB I thought I had enough. It's amazing what flaws in your ship actually doing the mission will show you.

[Undeadbanana]

Protip: Use 64-bit Linux with 8GB of RAM (or more), or use the OpenGL tweak for Windows and make sure to turn off the heat gauges using F10 until Squad fixes the memory leak with them. I've been able to run a ridiculous pile of mods for a significant period of time with the OpenGL tweak (including large parts packs, EVE and mods with additional planets). This was even back on 0.90 when the memory leaks were worse than what they are now.

A lot of players have been reporting success with a hack that enables 64-bit on windows as well, but watch out for some mods that disable themselves (like FAR) when they detect 64-bit on windows.

Thanks for the tip, I decided to make the dive back into Linux.

Had it for a while about a year ago, then school started getting busy so stopped using linux then eventually that Hard Drive ended up failing. Finally after getting everything back and running, I'm playing with about 140 mods (according to CKAN). Stock is fun but it gets kinda boring for me after a while.

I completely suck at this game (I've only landed on the Mun, Minmus, crash landed on Duna and Moho. Had the game since June 2013) but the hard work the Modders and Squad put into this game really make it an enjoyable experience. It frustrates me having to dual boot just to enjoy mods but it's totally worth it.