[General Questions and Answers] Nazo:
When the topic started doesn't matter. What matters is how it's being used. There's a reason this one is stickied too. It's being used today and has been for a long time. This it's a 2015 topic.

As for RAM in a smartphone, if you're doing CAD design while tabbing over and editing a high resolution scan image and tabbing over and encoding a video, you're doing it wrong. This is a smartphone. Simply put, 4GiB is a nice thing to put on paper, but the reality is Android software won't really utilize that at all and it's just wasted. If you're worried about futureproofing, you'll be bottlenecked at the CPU or GPU long before the RAM probably.

Darn. It looks like the Moto X 2013 isn't getting real CM support -- it just has a handful of builds and that's it. The irony is, the previous generation hardware (the 2012 with the same basic codename, the Droid Razr HD/M) has plenty of builds including enabled CM12 nightlies. I don't think it was really truly supported and a dev just picked it up for a little while by the look of it. It's kind of too bad since it's a great size for what I want at the least.

The HTC One M7 seems pretty neat. 1080p in a screen that size would be really nice for me (I have good eyesight, so I like a really high DPI) though I wonder if that might have the effect of making it harder for the SoC to actually handle games and such. It is awfully wide too -- pretty much just a bit over 1mm over the arbitrary criteria I made up. Still, I'm trying to dig around (man these CPUs are proprietary as heck!) and I think it's basically the almost same CPU as my Nexus 7 (2013) with a higher frequency. It's definitely the same GPU (though it's hard to believe 2D games are being limited by GPU) which is better than the SGS3's GPU. Assuming the two are indeed similar CPUs, my tablet is handling those trouble games fine, I just hate playing them on a tablet, so that would solve at least the problem of them, though perhaps not as much futureproofing as I'd prefer. Still, CyanogenMod helps a lot since I slim down the system and get rid of the bloatware crap. I think I'm going to have to hold one in person to really know what I'm working with, but it is at least smaller than the SGS3 (and I just really really like that high DPI 1080p I'll admit.)

BTW, I'm looking around and it seems the newer M8 is also fully supported by CyanogenMod and basically the same size and shape, so I'm looking at it now instead. Unless I'm just completely misunderstanding, it basically blows my current phone away and at least is slightly smaller anyway. At this point I may just have to accept slightly smaller because everyone is determined to go bigger and bigger...... EDIT: Woops... Wikipedia says it's larger than the M7 -- I thought it was suspicious that CM's device page said the exact same dimensions as the M7... At this point I'm almost considering giving up trying to get something smaller though. :( It sure does seem amazingly well supported and has a processor that blows my SGS3 out of the water. Size-wise I have to consider it to be the same (it's about 1mm less, wow) but I'm probably going to have to seriously consider this one for all that support and the fact I can actually FIND it somewhere...

The lack of a SD card reader in both is depressing, but then it seems everyone is eliminating those these days. I would really hope they at least have USB host...

Anyway, thanks. At the very minimum I have one that is some real food for thought.