Patching is useful if you have some specific setting or behavior you want to tweak but cannot do so given the available settings. Some folks enjoy using patching, but it appears to me that most don't find it necessary to patch, and I haven't yet either. I've been able to accomplish any tweaks or added features I wanted by using two other approaches that are simpler: (1) enabling developer mode--which gives you access to more settings--or (2) installing the KOReader app (or the Plato app), which gives you a lot more settings and fine-grained control over the rendering styles and reading features, vs the built-in Kobo software.

But in the end, I still mostly use the built-in Kobo software. I use KOReader for special-case things it's better at, like reading PDF's, and think it has a lot of promise as the devs are responsive to community and keep adding features. But I find for most ordinary reading needs, I still prefer Kobo. It tends to be very performant with snappy loading and rendering of even very large, complex books. And if using the native .kepub format for your books, you'll get some nice value-add features.