[Motorola Droid 4] Septfox:
Much appreciated. I'll get all my ducks in a row and set it up this weekend, hopefully.

As long as you don't manually destroy Safestrap's files (or something catastrophic happen), flashing to the stock slot/partition is fairly safe...it just didn't seem particularly effective when I tried it. If something goes wrong, you can always wipe and reflash something else, or use a slot; Safestrap is smart enough since several versions ago to not wipe its own files when wiping the stock slot.

If you keep your minfree limits tuned to maintain above ~180mb free memory, the phone and telephony apps being killed (should) be ok, since they can (hopefully) start back up fast enough. One of the key things in CM13 for our phones at the moment seems to be keeping memory free pre-emptively so it doesn't pass the 180mb mark and be stuck trying to free up memory while its performance is mysteriously crippled. Limits of 175/165/200 for Hidden App/Content Provider/Empty App keep it running decently, if not particularly good at multitasking.

The low_ram flag is an interesting thing that I always forgot to actually try. Turning it on appears to force software rendering for the UI, saving memory (I'm guessing because the OpenGL driver doesn't have to be kept loaded for GPU-accelerated rendering) but in turn disabling things like statusbar transparency, Recents previews (may actually be unrelated, a separate memory-saving step), Recents hardware acceleration (it's part of SystemUI after all; it's a choppy mess on software rendering), likely other stuff. I'd imagine that it disabled UI-unrelated things I haven't noticed as well.

It also brings up an curious quirk/bug a lot more often: the red/blue channels sometimes swap when part of the UI is redrawn or an interpolater fires off. This happens with the flag off as well, but much more rarely (presumably because most things are GPU rendered). I should really bug stargo about it, after I update to a modern nightly and make sure it's still there...

Memory savings based on post-boot measurements via Development Tools>Running Services: 40-50mb. None of the apps I use seemed affected much if at all.

You have to consider the ramifications of forcing the phone to rely on software rendering, though; everything is done on the CPU, which itself isn't as efficient at it and has other things it needs to be doing at the same time. What you gain in memory management, you might lose in UI smoothness/consistency, system responsiveness and app loading times. Having used it for a while, I can say things do feel quite a bit jankier in general if the CPU is doing anything else, worse than being on untuned CM11. Our poor OMAP4 just isn't nearly grunty enough, nor has enough cores, to do everything simultaneously without bogging down.

That all said, I would like to note that that amount and the bit saved from disabling Google's device locate/lock/wipe and screen/wake-state services was enough to enable Pokemon Go to start up and be mostly playable instead of OOMing halfway through loading :) as well as essentially disallowing the phone to do anything else while it was up...yea, memory's tight...

Edit: er, sorry for clogging up your thread with TL; DR babbling, joojoobee : \