[OnePlus 6 & 6T Cross Device Development] soulnull:
Ah, well I did that from recovery.. enabled adb in recovery, opened a shell to the phone, figured out which mountpoint it was, remounted rw, and deleted the system folder.. didn't reboot, went right to flashing crdroid over the existing crdroid install. *Then* rebooted right back into recovery and flashed gapps. I didn't want to reboot with no system folder, that sounds like a bad time.. I'm an archlinux user so I'm no stranger to absolutely obliterating things to somehow fix them (actually just completely obliterated my /usr/lib folder and reinstalled all packages on top of the existing install this last weekend to fix a cuda issue.. and it worked. Not my first rodeo, won't be my last. I'm an odd one).. either way, all good. The free space upon reboot was correct, so it certainly took it. No twrp here. Initially had about 100mb free, deleting it put that at 1.2gb (iirc), then reflashing crdroid had it at about 850mb (iirc).. rebooted, still 850.. took 750mb-ish gapps without issue. It shouldn't have worked, but it somehow did, I'm almost certainly forgetting something I did in there, I tend to go into tunnel vision and forget what *exactly* I did.. maybe I didn't actually reboot between flashing the rom and gapps since the rom was already flashed? I really don't remember what steps I did in what order since I was already way off script, I'm sorry.. I do think I had to remove that folder twice since it reappeared after a reboot, probably related.. I honestly can't pin down exactly what happened, but it works (until the next update when it switches slots again? We'll see), so I'm not complaining to you (on the contrary). Android is quite different from typical Linux, where I've been breaking and fixing stuff for... Ugh, over 20 years now.. wow.. that's.. where the hell did that time go. Yet still manage to break things in very trivial ways. Proof that time and experience isn't everything 😁

Your explanation of how the different modes interact with the filesystem is actually quite invaluable, thank you for that. I couldn't actually figure out the seemingly random behavior between the two and how things were randomly vanishing in different modes after changes.. makes a lot more sense now, thank you. Maybe next time it won't take me 2 hours to stumble my way through.. or might even be able to consistently make a change next time.

I do get the 100 hour bug, but I also had that on risingos.. so.. not really your bug. Annoying, but not your bug. Definitely appreciate your attempts to resolve it though.

I did want to note though (this is more for everyone, a PSA kinda thing that may not even affect anyone else), there were some GPS issues in *some* apps (Google Earth, Walmart.. but not Waze or maps), but certainly related to my non-conventional method... still, it could be useful to share if anyone else runs into this issue. Apparently my "play services" app permissions somehow reset themselves throughout all of my shenanigans, and programs that relied on them couldn't use them. You can't actually set the app permission in the app settings. There are 2 apps you'll need, "app ops permission Manager" and "shizuku". Find play services, and change location to "always". Mine showed up as "not changed".. but changing it to "always allow" did the job.

I can't really say I know much about the development side of these roms, I'm just a fast and loose "know enough to be dangerous yet get away with it most of the time" type. I truly do appreciate what you do with this rom, and if you gotta walk away to keep your sanity intact, I totally get it. I certainly wouldn't try to convince you otherwise. But seriously, can't say thanks enough for putting in the time and love. It's noticed and appreciated.