[EVO Shift 4G General] nurrwick:
2+ thoughts:

First, the 2.3.4 update is actually pretty damn good. Even if we were on a locked bootloader with no other options, this is the closest to acceptable stock performance we've had on this hardware.

Second, with one remark I'll follow up with, I don't think being stuck without an S-OFF bootloader is really all that big a problem for a casual power user. We have to remember there are kind of three categories of people who will use a smartphone - people that don't care about root and custom software, people like me who will happily install things if it means better performance but don't necessarily need to be doing so constantly, and people like those of you who hang out in the dev forum who flash software constantly.

I got tired of having to constantly reinstall all my old apps and restore SMS data and whatever else every time I changed roms to try, and with all due respect to the guys pumping out remarkably high quality work on Sense 3.0/3.5 roms, there are too many problems with that software on our hardware for my tastes. I flashed new software on my Hero constantly and that was kinda fun, but as my life's gone on, I don't really like it the same way I used to, and a bugfix release seems somewhat less magical than it used to.

For someone like me, only being able to flash boot and system doesn't represent a substantial problem.

Now! The remark is that I think the limited unlock is stupid and hinders the community, despite the fact that I don't need it. You guys (active devs) do a hell of a lot for the lives of these phones that the companies crap out as fast as they can and then shovel into "release worthless maintenance releases every 4 months" as soon as the container ship leaves port. I will admit: we have been lucky with the 2.3.4 update. This seems to be well tested and deals with a number of outstanding problems with our phones, not the least of which was the awful performance of the 2.3.3 updates. Unfortunately, the limited unlock and its two-step flash process only serve to slow down your progress. That's it. I cannot conceive of any reason HTC would have been able to use to justify making the choice. I actually went in and complained at them about it through htcdev just because I feel like this is going to, in the long run, only serve to destroy the active communities surrounding many of these phones.

What's the solution we can suggest (since we all know HTC doesn't care enough to read this)? Instead of a halfassed unlock state that takes all of 20 seconds to attain, we need at least the ability to have recovery flash to the boot partition, if not a full S-OFF. What's the balance? Make it harder for us to get, I guess - flashing eng bootloaders is kinda difficult and beyond the reach of people that don't understand what they're doing anyway, so I guess that makes for a good process.

I also guess that the downside, in many people's eyes, is that an official unlock :VOIDS YER WARRANTY: whereas unofficial/revertable unlocks that only *voids your warranty*. I don't know how common warranty claims are but it's clear Sprint doesn't want to service ANY phones and I don't know if anyone's ever sent a phone to HTC for work or not. This is probably an area where companies need to figure out how to bring the concept of hardware warranties in line with what software can do. A CPU overclock/undervolt is going to have a tough time failing a digitizer, right? So why refuse service? And what if we don't have software that can make any changes to how the hardware runs, like when a phone first comes out and we have unlock but not source code?

There are a number of problems at play with this situation but overall, this is stupid and regretful and we at least need a patched unlockable hboot that allows one-step rom flashing.

I know this has been the longwinded brainfart nobody wanted to read, but it feels good to write it down in a public place.