[HTC Sensation] scm_crash:
LOL. You're right. I didn't even realize that. It was also late for me as well.

HAHA... Yeah. I think we can make it official because it's funny. I didn't realize I was misspelling it though. :)

I use ADW on Gingerbread. One of the things I noticed when I was using ARHD with Sense 3.0 is that when exiting an app, it would take a few seconds (sometimes as many as 10) to get back to the home screen. And occasionally I'd get stuck with that HTC logo for a few seconds before getting the "Loading" message for a few seconds, and THEN finally getting back to the home screen.

When you look at the resources Sense takes up, you realize that 90% of Sense is aesthetics and 10% is function. The app drawer is just awful as well... It's so bloated and a lot of real estate is taken up with graphics. I'd rather have the entire screen filled with apps.

You're right, it's a personal preference. And I'm sure that HTC will fix some of the other things I have problems with for the ICS version (like not having a home screen or lock screen that auto-orientates. That one is a big one for me.)

I.C.S. fixed a lot of things in the UI that simply lacked "culture" in the previous versions of Android. I say culture loosely. This is also a place where Apple is lacking as well. It really feels that up until Android 3.0, menus and options were swung at with a big blunt object. Functionality over creative design. (Sense was completely the opposite.) iOS and Android both failed to see that things need to be fluid for the human brain to not reject it. Making things more fluid helps us understand better what we're doing.

By adding what I call "culture" to an already great foundation, you get something more akin to what we deal with in an every day environment. Look at a computer mouse from 1995 and look at one from today. Ergonomics now overlay a working foundation. We all use a mouse. Could we still use those giant harsh-feeling bricks from 1995? Sure, but would we pick one of those over a form-fitting, rubber covered ergonomic mouse we have today even if they both did exactly the same thing functionally? No.

I think what Google has done with I.C.S. is took its familiar feel and foundation, gave it a light weight frame, and smoothed out the harsh lines to give it a softer feel and make things more intuitive.

ALL of that being said, Sense tried to do something like that (of course to the extent of their OS limits), but they failed to achieve a few things which I believe was purely laziness.

1) While Sense on other HTC devices that have keyboards will rotate the home screen, they left that completely out of the Sensation. Why? I don't know, but it was a bad move.

2) Their app drawer is slow and makes it hard to get to the opposite end of the drawer because it's paginated. If they'd offered a way to have an infinite scroll like on other launcher app drawers, I would have less peeves about Sense. But they didn't leave the option which makes me feel like that was a lazy decision.

3) They decided not to give you the option to change the Sense bar buttons. I don't change much once I set my personalized stuff, so I don't understand why we need 4 different ways to get to their personalizing menu. It's on the Sense bar, it's the long touch on the home screen, it's in the menu of the home screen and it's in the system settings menu. Instead, I would like to be able to change those buttons to things I use more often. How about putting the camera in place of that personalizing button instead? I don't like to go searching for a camera when I need one. That's poor planning.

4) Not giving us the option to remove the "recent apps" in the notification bar? Lazy again. That thing uses so much extra space and I can hold down Home to see my recent apps. It also repeats apps rather than just placing them once... Lazy.

5) The fact that your MP3s cannot have spaces in the names otherwise Sense will see them but not let you set them as ringtones because they apparently didn't test for that. Lazy.

The list goes on, but you get my point. ICS solves my need for a balance between form and function. And it does this well. Things are simply easier to handle and more fluid. Playing with the VoldePort ROM makes me realize that there's no overlay I'll need to be extremely happy with Android. The bi-product will be less resource usage.

BTW, I was flipping through some web pages on ARHD 3.6.8 with Miren and some pages were so heavy they kept crashing my phone. I tried the same pages with ICS's stock browser (which by the way is ridiculously fast) and they loaded just fine. Testament to Google's hard work, they finally implemented a great browser and I won't need an aftermarket browser again.

Oh, and I really don't think I'm going to install Flash on ICS. While I don't like Apple, I agree with them that Flash shouldn't be a requirement to browse the web. HTML5 is awesome and as a web developer, I can tell you first hand I really HATE Flash.