I don't understand your issues with Kate - it has been my friend all the time and never let me down. It supports sessions, code highlighting, file history and many more useful features. If I want to read a simple text file I use Kedit - thus in konqueror kedit is first choice, but for scripting/code reading and making notes I prefer kedit.
I write this, so that there is one voice for Kate. Not that someone has the wrong impression of me or Kate.
That has been my solution to getting rid of kate. I liked gedit, but it scrambled the contents of a file one too many times so I'm using geany now. A pretty face, less capable, but has yet to scramble a file just while changing one byte in it. Plugins are gradually appearing as coders scratch their own personal itches.
plugins in kate are not mandatory
I think my distaste for kate probably starts with its default font selections. Ugly is being kind...
font is easy customizable. In fact I like the Monospace as it has fixed width for each char, so that the position is also fixed.
regards