@jrubins: I’ll raise a glass of whiskey to your scotch!
I too have not been without my fair share of issues with the Photon. I’ve been hacking with my trusty ol’ Spark Cores while I wait for the motivation to start troubleshooting my Photon.
I’m not as microcontrollery-technical as many of the other elites, but maybe I can offer some help!
- Piette DHT library vs Adafruit DHT library: I think this all comes down to timing and blocking code. In particular, the Photon and Core need to sync up with the cloud every now and then (something like every 15 to 20 seconds). If they can’t or things are blocked and delayed too much, the device isn’t going to be happy. Also, when the device does its cloud check-in, it can cause delays in other timing-sensitive code. Those two reasons are at least part of the problem why the Adafruit library didn’t work out well in the first place.
- Difficulties with local Particle Dev IDE: One suggestion I can offer (if you haven’t already tried it yourself), is to make sure all of your project is contained within a directory (and not just an
.inofile on your desktop or something). Try to clean out any cruft that’s not directly related to compiling and/or put it in aparticle.ignorefile. - Web IDE Difficulties: I’ve grown a little frustrated with the response times and switched to another IDE (Cloud9 – I did a write-up about it in another thread). I think the problem there is it just hasn’t scaled well and hasn’t had the attention that it needed. A lot of things have changed since the web IDE was scoped and launched, and it’s a complicated system to update. I heard within the physical confines of Particle HQ (note that I live some 2,500 miles away) that the web IDE is on the radar, but I don’t know the priority off the top of my head.
If you can, give the Particle CLI another shake with a different editor (such as Sublime that you mentioned). Since you’re on a Mac, try out some of the shell scripts from my Cloud9 thread mentioned earlier. Hopefully that will take some of the IDE edge off. Also, I am living proof that you can compile a sketch with no errors or warnings and lock up a Core/Photon. Infinite loops and buffer overflows are tough for compilers to catch! 
The firmware update for the Photon that someone mentioned above is supposed to address some bugs that I think are giving me grief with my Photon. I’ve shelved my Photon until that update hits production. Then I’ll start threatening my Photon with a hammer if I still have issues out of it.
As unbiased as I’ve tried to make this post, I do want to “defend” the Particle team. They are a truly exceptional group of people. They are a passionate, smart, and dedicated team, all of which left me feeling like I made a whole new group of BFFs in just a few days. Feedback like yours is taken very seriously, and it is a matter of personal pride for everyone to get it resolved as quickly as possible. The Photon is still a very new product with some pretty drastic changes from the original Spark Core, so there are bugs that are cropping up that never reared their ugly heads in development. Being a 20-year veteran of software development, I now this feeling all too well. We (speaking for all developers) just need to “own” our mistakes, acknowledge them, and fix them in a reasonable manner. There are always other forces at play like the bigger picture and business priorities that will get in the way.
I appreciate reading this polite feedback, even if it took some “discourse” to drill down to some of the issues. If some of the suggestions in this post or the posts prior don’t fix your issues, keep an eye out for that new firmware release. If that doesn’t improve things, hit @christine up for that refund. My personal belief is that it will work itself out in the next few weeks, and you may be glad you held on!