The member module might be missed; with EE Core you can only have 3 registered users and 3 channels. Most importantly, though, it can’t be used for contract or client work of any kind, it’s only for small, personal sites. If you’re building a “largish blog” it’s probably not a good fit.
I’ve been opting to use Disqus for comments.
We’ve been considering adding comments to our “blog” type section as well and our plan is to use Disqus as well. EE has been great to run our blog, but we’re commercial so it’s on the full version though.
Facebook social plugin for comments also a suggestion: https://developers.facebook.com/docs/plugins
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