[Droid X Android Development] bladebarrier:
I'm not quite sure I know what people are looking for, when it comes to ROM's, or for that matter that why people are so concerned about the locked down kernels.

The main issues in my opinion were gaining root, solid customization, removal of bloat, proper tethering, and over/under-clocking.

All of those things have been addressed, and have only been getting better with time.

You can do all of the above without using a ROM, except the heavy customization and deeper removal of blur (which some people like, and some people do not).

The Droid X has an outstanding battery life, especially considering its largest in class screen size, it has a good processor, advanced graphics processing, solid reception and transmission, etc..

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Now to address to OP directly.

It really depends on what you expect of the ROM. Plenty of them work perfectly fine for almost all needs.

If you're looking for partial blur, but removal of bloat, improved speeds, and stability, I'd suggest trying RubiX 1.0 Blurry. It retains the Blur, is pretty much bug free as far as my experience was, improves speeds, removes bloat, and by using Titanium and making nandroids, you can remove extra chunks of blur, piece by piece, on your own.

I personally found Tranquility 3.0 as a pretty comfortable "starter friendly" ROM. It was very stable, and while it retains some bloat and blur, it's a bit faster than the stock ROM, has better battery life, and again using Titanium you could remove some extra junk that you don't want (being careful by creating nandroids in between).

I personally really dig Fission, which appears to be pushing itself towards a solid goal very quickly. It's going to be less user friendly at first, as it really starts digging into the removal and replacement of blur altogether (forget seeing even a hint of bloat here).

The basic idea is that there are apps that probably replace just about everything you're looking for. You may have been happy with the blur ones though, because no one should say that all of blur is terribly made. That's just not the case.

The idea of Fission is to get closer to a pure Android Vanilla feel, and to customize/replace the blur with other apps. I personally use Vignette for my camera app, and have ever since almost the first day that I bought the X. When people in the forums ask about whether or not a certain ROM could use the stock camera app (which many are able to), I usually just skip to the next post, because I know I don't need it. Vignette is better than the stock app, so why should I care either way. Granted it's a paid app, just like the blur camera app is a "paid" app, except only motorola users get to have it as part of the price of purchasing the phone.

Anyways, best of luck finding what you're looking for.

The ROMs will only get stronger for the X, but if you like the blur, and plenty (if not most users) do, then you don't have to go custom. You can root the stock ROM. You can tether it. You can create backups on many levels. You can over/under-clock it. By simply swapping to a stock deodexed version of the stock ROM, you can theme it. You can use Titanium to freeze or uninstall bloat, and some blur, that are normally protected....