The default setup is pretty crappy but with some tweaking of the ssh connection setup, It does a decent job and I used it for actual work for several years.
Would you mind outlining the settings or pointing to a reference?
It's been a long time. Most of the stuff I was able to get from conversations on the Emacs IRC channel of freenode. Many of those "tricks" are documented here https://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/TrampMode but I don't know if it's out of date.