FOSUserBundle: what is the point?

Well, your question sounds more like a rant, but you got some points.

In my opinion, the main problem of the FOSUserBundle as well as a lot of Bundle in the community, is that they try to make it customizable, generic, re-usable, whatever.

The goal is fair, but in reality it often leads to not human friendly code. Most of the time, you will take much more time to "get it done" using community bundle than making your own (see Sonata bundles).

I don't say they are bad bundles, not at all, but they deserve different purposes.

For me such bundles may help newcomers to have a quick implementation, to get things done, and in the case of a Rapid Application Development, it may be really easy to get a fully working application with all the registration process done.

But most of the time, you realize that using third party codes ties you too much to their own concept and that is wrong.

In comparison, I do like very much the npm community, there are A LOT of little package with one function which you can easily integrate, in the same way, I try, to favor library instead of bundle when I want to release an open source project. The point is the framework implementation is free of any concept or philosophy and easily integrate in an existing project.

I remember some early days where I had to play with Joomla, Drupal, Wordpress, whatever, it was the "plugin/extension/module" fashion, in the same way that we often hear "there is a bundle for that", some people, or company just want to get it done, no matter the quality, the future of the application because it already have been sold.

To conclude, such bundles can greatly help and speed up development process, but be careful, if you have custom requirements, performance implication, etc. don't use them, however if you only want to a quick proof of concept, or a simple application, it is worth.

This is a fiction story based on my own experience and failures using it :)