thanks everyone, this is really helpful.
in light of your experiences, it seems like the best of all worlds might
be to use a modern computer/os with Purr Data for editing, make sure to
stick with vanilla only objects, and use vanilla for deploying.
Just for reference-- I developed Purr Data on a Lenovo X60 which I believe
was modern in 2006. OS was Ubuntu 14.04. I could get 60fps doing silly data
structure animations without audio dropouts. Granted, that was a trivial audio
chain.
-Jonathan
anyone see any potential pitfalls there? -ali