I would strongly recommend that you use the Erlang abstract format. It will always be better supported by the OTP team and will have fewer compatibility issues.
For example, in OTP 23 we improved the syntax for binary matching. To do that, we had to change how we generated Core Erlang. We stopped using the receive construct in Core Erlang and started using new low-level primops for handling the mailbox. The changes were not in violation of the Core Erlang specification, but it broke tools that depended on the old implementation.
