[Asus Transformer TF700] RSchlierbeck:
Looking for more reassurance

I'll start with a thank you to everyone who has contributed here. This is a great community with a wealth of knowledge. I've been reading and making notes for weeks gathering information to make an informed decision on how (if) to proceed with installing a custom ROM. I'm a software developer by vocation working entirely in the Windows world and completely inexperienced with Android development and Linux in general. So I can only try to understand this by relating it to what I know of PCs.

I think I'm after the same thing as everyone else and just want a great user experience wtih a super fast tablet, no bugs or problems and of course I want it to be easy to do and completely reversible. I'm not actually fooish enough to imagine that I'm going to get all of those things though. I have read through hundreds of posts here and as good as all the information is there are still some gaps for me. Mostly in areas that can't be easily put into words but instead need to be experienced to be understood fully. For example I read comments like "this ROM is great!" or "this thing flies". Very encouraging but kind of lacking qualatatively speaking. Then the next post may say something like "This is awesome. But now I can't play any of my movies."

I did watch a video on youtube that showed a tablet running CleanROM. The idea was to show how fast it was but honestly it didn't convince me. My tablet is very fast navigating through home screens and once a web page loads it scrolls and resizes just fine. My biggest speed issues come with having to wait for a page to fully load before you can do anything with it. And Netflix... Netflix streams just fine once you actually get to the movie. It's navigating their app to even get to the movie that is ridiculous. Sometimes I feel I could draw the movie tiles by hand faster. Then once they all load, scrolling through them stutters and stalls.

I understand some of the risks of installing a custom ROM like voiding my warranty but it's the risks I don't understand that concern me. So I'd like to test my understanding with the community to see if I've got everything right.

The reason that the TF700 is slow or lags is because of an IO bottelneck using internal memory.

A custom ROM can bypass this by using an external SD card as working RAM and increase IO speed.

I will need to buy a high performance SD card to see the performance increase.

To install a custom ROM I need to Unlock my TF700 using the tool provided by Asus.

Unlocking will void my warranty.

I will not be able to get OTA updates anymore.

I run the risk of Bricking my tablet.

If, in the future, Asus comes out with an update that fixes all the problems I would still be able to use it by downloading from their site and doing a custom recovery.

A custom ROM like CleanROm will allow me to use the manufacturers applications that came with the tablet.

My Google bookmarks will stil synch with my desktop and site usernames and passwords are preserved between boots. (read that these things are not preserved with browser2ram)

To update to any new versions of Android I will need to wait until someone creates a custom ROM for that version.

DRM issues have been resolved in the current CleanROM release.

Performance of the Netflix app is greatly improved under a custom ROM.

I need to get some additional apps to facilitate the process (TWRP?)

Lastly, is there anyone in the Rochester, New York (USA) area that has a TF700 running CleanROM that would be willing to get together?

I appoligize for the lengthy post and appreciate all responses.

Thank you.

Scott