shogunsafe-uses-too-many-words introduction:

I have never used any IF system. I have one story that will be more branched linear (choose your own adventure, squiffy, quest "gamebook"?) style, and one that will require lots of navigation (everything is secretly a "key" for a "lock" in another room, quest normal game) style.

For any of you who know a bit about all the systems accepted for hosting here, if you please, take a hard look and give me an objective take on what the best system is right now. I'm always tempted by the new hotness, but in this case I'm mostly looking for the editor to Just Work™ and stay out of my way and let me dump in content and write.

Aside, either because of server performance or the peculiarities of my internet connection (breaks long connections? per-request latency?), I cannot play quest 5.x games or use the web editor; click, literally 30 seconds, new text, click, click, click, 45 seconds, maybe more text but maybe a 'must restart'. I would blame my connection outright, but every other site is fine.

I have a couple thousand lines of ES/JS under my belt (learned it to play another game 😅 (cyberpunk hacking game bitburner)). Just enough ability I had been leaning toward QuestJS. I can't get QEdit working though. Where QuestJS's latest release just downloaded and runs from index.html, I couldn't find instructions to download or install or run QEdit. Without an editor, hand-writing xml probably isn't a good fit.

I'd recommend Squiffy. I never would have learned anything about how to make IF without it.
Do download the editor and don't trust the online demo. I'd further recommend mrangel's additions. This one makes a lot of things work more intuitively and powerfully, and this here gives you an interactive collapsible sidebar for an inventory, or stats, or whatever.

Thanks for taking the time to suggest it, and the tweaks.

I may circle back to Squiffy, but my main computer right now is a Mac, and squiffy-editor's instructions and dependencies are hopelessly out of date and/or deprecated. It seems IF authoring is a bit niche, and so my hand may be forced to reach for what works rather than what's best. Perhaps suffering through a hosted editor or finding a local editor that will in my case run on macOS, Android, or iPadOS. Oooor running linux/windows in a VM for Squiffy.