[HTC Wildfire S] Tigger31337:
Okay, I'll bite.

First of all, I'm not sure if "noobs love stock" is entirely accurate.

From what I've directly seen/heard, I'm actually experiencing the opposite. Newbs are coming out of the woodwork with their (perfectly adequate) WFS and saying "Hey, I heard there's a custom ROM for this thing! That sounds like hacking! Hacking is cool! Therefore, I want it!"

I don't think a lot of the "noobs" (I hate that word... we were all NOOBS at one point) fully understand what they will gain (and, more importantly, LOSE) by upgrading to a custom ROM. I don't think there's any custom ROM out there right now that makes my phone objectively better. Instead, what you get are custom ROMs that do a, b, and c better, but in the meantime they break features x, y, and z. It's up to you, the user, to decide if you can live with the trade-off and what features are honestly the most important to you.

You say, "They call custom roms buggy and glitchy" but I think that's because, generally, they are! Of the 15+ ROMs I've tested, a lot were simply buggy or glitchy. Almost all had at least 1 minor problem with them. In the end, it comes down to "can I live with this bug?"

You're right - no one should call your (or any) ROM "buggy" if they haven't actually tried it. That's just stupid. But I'm getting the impression that isn't the actual core of your complaint. You want to see everyone convert to a custom ROM. Well, I'm on board with that... but you gotta understand: the stock ROM is actually quite good. I will grant that it comes with too much bloatware. But the Sense UI is simply stunning and stable. Almost everyone I asked says they miss it (after upgrading to a custom ROM) and they simply "learn to live without it"). I don't want to learn to live without it. I want my Sense experience, minus all the bloatware, stable, and a decent battery life.

You complain about the stock battery life? But I find custom ROMs MUCH worse at handling the battery than the stock (all other settings being equal). Dunno why this is, but it just is.

In a nutshell, users will just have to decide for themselves.

If you create a grid, like I did (sorry I don't have the link handy, but it's on XDA somewhere) and compare each ROM side by side, one thing will become immediately obvious to you: while each ROM may excel in 1 or 2 features, no

one

ROM excels in ALL features. So, you're back to the user having to make a decision: what do I value more? And any time she has to do that, she won't be 100% satisfied with a custom ROM because she'll know, in the back of her mind, what perfectly useful function she had to give up in order to move to the new custom ROM.

If you need specifics, I'll give you specifics. But for now, I promise you that each custom ROM does at least one thing worse than stock.

- Anthony

---------- Post added at 09:23 PM ---------- Previous post was at 09:17 PM ----------

p.s.

Lest I be regarded as "ungrateful", I just want to make it clear:

I am currently running a custom ROM and I am

extremely

grateful for all the chefs who cook us up these yummy things. I've expressed my gratitude several times across several threads. That, however, is not the issue here. The issue is that I still find myself having to learn to live with a deficit (or two) after upgrading to a custom ROM, as described in my above post.