jeez.

switching back and forth between litestep and explorer is not difficult.

there is a difference in performance; numbers will differ depending on the system. in general, litestep has a much smaller memory footprint. personally, i also find that litestep crashes far less than explorer did (and when/if it does, it's much easier to restore). but again, that depends on your setup (which build you use, which modules you load, etc.).