[Captivate General] nkrick:
I have not flashed for mostly the same reasons as you. It seems that every combination has different things that work and things that do not work. I want every function of my phone to work properly. That includes hardware noise cancellation and proper bluetooth support, which seem to be a major issue on i9000 ROMs/kernels/modems. My biggest issue with Captivate ROMs/kernels/modems is the apparent lack of support for bluetooth voice dialing. Now it is a fair argument that bluetooth voice dialing does not work on the AT&T 2.1 ROM, but it is not a supported feature of 2.1. It is a supported features of 2.2, so why shouldn't I (we) expect it to work? If a feature that is supposed to work in 2.2 does not work, that doesn't give me the best feeling about flashing the ROM.

I came over from the Windows Mobile side and I flashed custom ROMs on my Fuze without thinking twice, but there were never core or standard features of the phone or OS missing in the ROMs I flashed. I had bluetooth + voice dialing, good battery life, good cell reception, good working GPS, extremely good stability, great performance (for the hardware), and good voice quality with working noise cancellation in all the ROMs I ran.

I think that overall the devs here are doing a good job, and I think things will improve after the release of 2.2 sources for the captivate, but it seems that right now, there is a compromise involved in any of the custom ROMs.

I can accept the fact that the current ROMs don't meet my expectations, but when people say, "just start flashing" to people like myself who have higher expectations, it gets a little old. The attitude that only people willing to accept these compromises should be reading/contributing to the xda-developers forum is also annoying. I think it is great that there are people working on custom ROMs and there are people willing to run them with the compromises they have to make, but that does not mean that everyone should just be willing to make those compromises and if they are not willing they should not post.

I have made very few posts in the Captivate forum, I guess it could be said that I have been lurking and reading up on each new custom ROM as it comes out, waiting for one that seems to meet my expectations. I have not been vocal, or complained about the fact that we need to make compromises. But others that ask questions about whether certain things work, seem to get flamed and told to just accept the way things currently are, or they are completely ignored. If the devs don't want to answer questions such as, "does bluetooth voice dialing work," or "how is bluetooth voice quality in this ROM," then they should put this type of information directly in the first couple of posts. The newest Cognition ROM thread has this type of information and I greatly appreciate that DG included it. For most ROMs you can't find out if certain items work properly without reading the first 10-20 pages of posts.

Maybe the main issue for people like me (with higher expectations from my phone) is that good information about what works and what does not work often does not float to the top of the ROM dev threads. I started using xdandroid on my Fuze as my first introduction to Android and each phone that it ran on had a thread and on the first page was a listing of each major functional piece (sound, camera, bluetooth, etc) and whether or not it was working yet. Each developer can do as they choose, but if the status of functional items and known bugs was listed in the first page, it would save on questions and some of the less than helpful responses that the questions cause.