[One (M7) General] One Twelve:
So there is something in the S,v & 1x that somehow works in all situations in auto. Or more precisely works in all situations that you need.

if you look at various phone boards, i've noticed the statement ..

my <insert older model> phone camera works better than this <new flagship>

is a common meme in complaints. What is rarely mentioned is the context in which that comment is made. Now that you've done that it makes more sense. People get a new phone expecting better only to discover worse. Their needs are very specific and all of a sudden they lost what they earlier took for granted. Was it a worthwhile upgrade ? not so much in this narrow case.

The real question is whether you can work around it or not. Some can, others cannot. It's a pain but you got the phone for other more important reasons and did not expect to have an issue here.

The term 'last century' only matters in your context. You'd never get low light shots with cameras from last century, you'd be hard pressed to get it with even models from two years ago but i doubt you care for that. Thing is you've got a phone that is more advanced and can take clearer shots. What matters is whether you can get it to work for what you want and how easy it is to achieve it.

What i see here is 8MP worked for you then you when it came to 4MP you could not adapt. You actually noticed the difference right off the bat. In your case 8MP is a minimum and important requirement.

There are many reasons for blurry, since you've used camera phones for some time i take it you know how to hold it properly and if light is too low then to use flash. Since you're merely documenting things as opposed to taking pictures you don't really care as to picture quality, so long as its legible and usable. This is a lot less demanding and easier to do than pleasing.

Now, you said blurry not noisy. Is that right. Noisy can be improved with lower ISO. Thing is if you are moving around in situations where the light is very different from one shot to another then its tedious to set it. general rule of thumb is 100 and below for outdoors, 200-400 indoors. Everything else on auto.

To prevent higher ISO from being used, disable stabiliser and use a steady hand. This will help auto take lower ISO shots.Lower ISO means clearer shots in zoom. Examine the exif of the shots taken and you will see the lower the ISO the cleaner the shot will be. Course you can only use low ISO when light is adequate. Indoors you will need to use flash to bump light up as and when necessary.

use the one screen shutter button instead of the dedicated hardware button. you'd think the hardware button makes it easier but the onscreen button with a slight tap will reduce shake more. I've noticed people advising to do this with low light and long shutter delay. Don't peck at the button, press/swipe and hold for a little.

Other thing is sony has different denoising algorithms compared to the Koreans, which tend to be more aggressive. Zooming in tends to show a cleaner shot on those so people think its better. But that also affects other things. So if it works for your particular needs then this way of doing it is better than for others. But for the majority, of photos which will be taken in all sorts of lighting sony's way has advantages over the others.

I never said auto was crap, i said you can always do better than auto if you know what you're doing. I'm referring generally where you want to take photos in different situations as opposed to a narrow aim of documenting things. Simply because the camera will never know what it is you are shooting. of course they won't remove auto because many people use it for convenience. In an ideal world auto would produce shots better than manual which can happen some times but for others you need to do it yourself.

How soon after launch did you get the S & V. Because with the Z, i noticed Sony took at least a few more months to improve auto. Similar with the Z1. 3-5 months after launch it worked better. Whereas other vendors tend to get it right at launch. This is a sony thing. So if you got the Z1 soon after launch things will be little worse than currently. And this impression is what sticks around. I see more people posting SA photos in lower light than earlier where it used to be mostly in good light.

Did you try with scn:text mode since you wanted to see text. This is a tweaked setting for a specific purpose. If you have did it make any difference ? With flash without flash. if flash is too strong, then obscure it a bit. Some apps even allow you to use torch mode which could help.

On a more general level the angle you use to take a shot matters. If you can emphasise shadows you will get better legibility with any phone. I mean. you've been through two phones and they did not meet your requirements. 4MP is a hard limit but i think you should be able to get what you need with the Z1.

Without looking at a photo and how you took it, I can't say any more. The difficult bit here is you need to understand how the problem happened to be able to fix it.