[Nexus 5 General] LiquidSolstice:
@

What a load of unsubstantiated condescending bull****.

I'm going to have to apologize for the long rant, but this sort of attitude on XDA really, really bothers me. It's bad enough we have Android elitists who make all of us look like scumbags when they brag about Android or attack iOS or whatever, for some reason, we now have a generation of users who are acting elitist towards their own fellow Android users.

If things were such that the best operating system in the world is the one that has the most customization and the most squeezed out of our computers, we'd all be be running our own custom-rolled versions of ArchLinux instead of Windows or OS X. We'd be writing our own programs from source, custom-creating our own hardware, and so on.

You might say your experience is better, but there are always drawbacks. I've lost count how many hundreds of ROMs I've flashed, how often I've striven to find the most jam-packed ROM possible and combine it with the kernel that has the longest list of features. What I've found? Inconsistency. Crashes. Random reboots. Partially skinned elements that I can't remove. Fully skinned elements that I'm at the mercy of the themer/dev for. The list goes on and on.

People here work hard. They go to great lengths to try and make something extraordinary and for that, I cannot possibly be more thankful than I already am, and I refuse to step on any of them personally.

But the fact remains that the more you try to tack on to Android, the more things go wrong. I may hate what CyanogenMod is doing these days, but in some aspects, I think they've got the right idea. Stability above all else, and then customization afterwards.

People on XDA go through phases. The phase you're in is the one that lasts the longest; the pursuit of that absolutely perfect ROM and the absolute best possible performance with the best possible battery. The most features, the most everything.

That's awesome for you I'm glad you're enjoying your time (and I'm serious, I'm not mocking you). It's a blast to tinker, tweak, tune, etc etc etc. I miss that. I swear to god, I really do.

But I'm no longer a senior in college with an HTC Hero (and a real smartphone for the first time). I have left the phase you are in. I'm an adult (not that I mean to say you are not an adult). I have responsibilities, I have work, I have people who rely on me. I can no longer tell someone "Hey, I know you sent me this, but I was having phone trouble" or "Sorry I missed your call dude, I was tinkering with my phone". I don't have enough time to find myself in TWRP halfway through the day. My job, my family, my girlfriend, all of them depend on being able to reach me, and all of them depend on my phone functioning the way it is supposed to. I don't need floating windows, or HALO, or PIE, or the ability to have dozens of different shortcut ribbons where I can open up apps even if I'm in a full screen game and I'm holding the phone upside down and facing away from me (exaggeration, yes, but not without a point).

I need uptime. I need stability. And Android out of the box provides that. It's fast, smooth, I get great battery, and I have 100% stability. My phone has not rebooted itself 3 weeks (since I got my RMA device), and to date, I have had no random crashes and no glitches. I supplement it with GravityBox and XPosed for the sake of changing the quick toggles, but that is it.

This is the part where you tell me about xyz ROM, and how it's perfect, and it's stable, and you use all these features and you have no issues and clearly I'm doing something wrong. But that's the problem, there is no "perfect" ROM. They all just get very close, and the closer to pure Google stock/AOSP you go, the fewer the issues get to be. The problem is that you have either not hit said issues yet, or you are overlooking any crashes or glitches because "the payoff is worth it to you". Make no mistake about it, just because that payoff is not "worth it" to me doesn't mean I am getting any less out of my phone than you are.

There will be a point where you stop and realize that you need your phone to be a phone, and you tweak it so much and hover around on XDA so often for the freshest of the fresh stuff that you realize you are spending more time restoring your apps through Titanium Backup than actually using them. I don't know when it will happen, but I promise you, it will happen.

The problem with your car analogy is simple; you don't buy a Corvette because you're planning on stomping the gas all the way down at every single red light, every single Starbucks run, every single grocery trip. You buy it because it is a superior vehicle, and when the moment is right, when their is context for it, on that special day, you will push the gas all the way down and simply enjoy it, and when you are done, it will be back to the movement utility it is.

The features you thirst for are not necessary. They are cool, they are useful, but make no mistake about it, one does not need them for the sake of enjoying their phones.

There's no need to talk down to people who aren't in the same phase as you. Unless you're getting some sort of commission for getting people to use custom software, you gain nothing by it except disparaging comments.

Take it easy. We're all Android users here.