for the average folk that dont want to deal with the complete blockchain i would recommend using electrum, then if your mining your not an average bitcoin users most up to date on news and block statistics.
Even using electrum has some extent of risks. Because you don't know which server you are connecting, and what version of bitcoin qt they are using. The best practice is to run your own bitcoin qt wallet locally with the newest version software.
unfortunately this is true to some extent.
but you can choose which server you are joining.
click on the green circle on the lower right corner, un-check the auto-connect, select which server you prefer.
after connecting to a server, in the console tab there is the information about the server you have connected to.
but the problem is that only some of them inform what version of bitcoin they are using.