[AT&T Samsung Galaxy S 4 General] Aou:
I love my S4, and I really have no problems with TouchWiz, apart from the gigantic size of /system (makes it a bear when making and storing frequent nandroid backups). I've been playing around with the Google Edition ROM v1.3 for the past couple of days, and I'm really impressed with the small size of the ROM, and the noticeable "snappiness" that it brings to my device (the stock rom with OTA and reduced bloatware is fine, but G.E. seems just a hair faster).

That being said, I'm returning back to the nandroid of my stock rom for now, and here's a list of reasons why:

I absolutely LOVE Samsung's camera app that's in TW. I know that someone is already working on porting it over to G.E., but this is something I can't go without in the meantime.

I miss the cool lockscreen "lens flare" effect. It seems such a trivial thing, but I do miss it.

The Samsung Keyboard. I'm really surprised nobody has ported this over to AOSP yet (link me to it if I'm wrong). Some of the haters hate the Samsung keyboard, but I much prefer it over every other one I've tried, including AOSP/Google, Swiftkey, and several others available in the Play Store.

I liked the toggles on the notification bar. I found a suitable replacement, though, so it's hard for me to list this one.

Stock music player. The Google Edition only comes with Google Play Music it seems? I just want my stock music player back tyvm. *shrug* Maybe I missed something, but I just want to play my MP3's offline without subscribing to something ridiculous and unnecessary.

I liked the Optical Reader that came with stock. Again, this is trivial because there's so many replacements on the Market, but Samsung's version was pretty nice. G.E. doesn't seem to have one out-of-the-box that I've seen...

Stock Dialer. This is a huge one for me, the more I think about it. Back when I had my S2 and I moved from TW to CM, I missed the same feature that's missing in G.E.: dialing contacts by name! Very frustrating to have to search through my contacts list, rather than simply dialing "john" on the keypad. -_-

I did have an issue with the Reboot option missing, but thankfully Modaco's Xposed Mod works great to restore this. So, really a non-issue now...

S Beam is nice. I know AOSP/G.E. have "Android Beam", but iirc, it's not nearly as quick and smooth as S Beam is. My wife has the Note2 running rooted stock, so it's a nice feature to share larger files very quickly with her.

The stock TW launcher is nice - I don't see what everyone is fussing about. It's smooth, it's customizable, it loops around, and does everything I could ask for. The one in Google Edition isn't that nice. I know your response is, "why not just download another one?" Because I feel I shouldn't have to, that's why :P

Group Play anyone? I'm sure this will get ported over eventually, but it's not immediately available that I'm aware of.

While some of the extra features on the S4 are very "gimmicky" (i.e. air view/gesture, smart stay, etc.), they are also some of the very features that make the S4 unique amongst its peers. It's fun to show these off, once in a while, and I sometimes find them useful. Without all this, I feel like I'm just using a super-fast, super-sized Galaxy S2 running CM10.1 again.

There might be a few minor insignificant things I'm missing on this list, but that's everything I can puke out right now. Now you may ask, "what's the purpose of this thread?? why complain here??" - First, I don't want to plug up the G.E. thread more than it is already (I feel guilty for contributing to that mess already). Second, I'm somewhat hoping that each of these items can be addressed, fully and completely, at some point or another. I know the G.E. rom is very fresh, and work is currently underway to port some of these TW elements to it. It may be a while, it may be never. But perhaps there will be sufficient and acceptable alternatives to each of these, and perhaps the masses here on XDA can sway me back into Google Edition before long. Lastly, I could only hope that someone else might find this thread useful. Perhaps someone is debating making the jump to G.E. right now, and would like to know what it's like in comparison. Hope this helps you, Mr. On-The-Fence. ;)

Now please, keep this thread clean. Perhaps offer your own gripes about Google Edition (versus TW)? Perhaps even add the things you love about G.E. (there are plenty to list, I'm sure!). Perhaps offer solutions to some of the items I've listed above. But posting things like "G.E. is AOSP-based, and doesn't have all these touchwiz things, get over it." won't help anyone.

Okay.... Go!