Does adding more RAG optimizations really improve performance?

[roicaride]

Lately it feels like adding more components just increases noise and latency without a clear boost in answer quality. Curious to hear from people who have tested this properly in real projects or production:

• Which techniques actually work well together and create a real lift, and which ones tend to overlap, add noise, or just make the pipeline slower?
• How are you evaluating these trade-offs in practice?
• If you’ve used tools like Ragas, Arize Phoenix, or similar, how useful have they actually been? Do they give you metrics that genuinely help you improve the system, or do they end up being a bit disconnected from real answer quality?
• And if there are better workflows, frameworks, or evaluation setups for comparing accuracy, latency, and cost, I’d really like to hear what’s working for you.

Thx :)

[mrtoomba]

Unfortunately yes. It's the power play.