that's true, after making the question I thought that mainly the most hardcore guys stick to pd-van, because it's easier for them to adapt it to their needs, and there's more tradition with self-programming (enhancing the core package). but I would dare say that for many non-developper-users, pd-ext is much more used than pd-van. pd-ext is a couple of decimals behind pd-van (and the windows version even more, as the disk for it is out of order since last summer), but HC doesn't have a grant to work on pd-ext.
yep, when you need to compile some stuff, pd-extended is not really made for you. since i quite often have to use a very recent Gem version for my project, (specially when i correct some Gem bugs when working on this project), i must recompile Gem on the target machine, so using extended is not really easy. using extended is ok when installing a project i made about 1 year ago...