This is what he said that I can share: "mikroC has a good support of internal libraries but the binary code is not that optimized". Like I said, the rest boiled down to "you get what you pay for." If you want cheap, you get cheap... either minimal features, buggy or bloated code. Nobody makes a compiler that is bug-free, optimized, and feature-full.

And, more importantly for me, I use the Proteus PIC/Spice simulator for debugging my code, and the Mikro compilers put out a proprietary format (not a standardized format), so it is only useful for use with their own debugger.

You can always use PicBasic (instead of PicBasic Pro), which is a lot cheaper, and almost certainly bug-free... but it has minimal features and no optimization. There's also the free Pascal-like compiler, JAL: http://www.voti.nl/jal/