[EVO 4G General] Justin.G11:
OK, Ill give my own highly biased and never humble opinion on CM sense no one specifically asked me and I feel it's necessary to contribute to both further my own arrogance as well demonstrate my awesomeness.

First of all, IMHO it's important to look at the various ROMs as a sort of origin of the species, if you will. From this alone I think you'll find a lot of allegiance between different flavor of ROMs will come largely from this origin, which points to both roots as well as potential. Sense ROMs are, when you get back down to it, just the HTC Sense software with some noteworthy tweaks. In the end, they all rely on HTC to release an update first, then custom mods are put in and the ROMs are baked as their own. To this end, one of the _greatest_weaknesses_ of Sense is that it is largely at the mercy of HTC to continue to have a vested interest in the product in order for updates to keep coming. In the world of cell phones being obsolete in months, this is a bad thing.

CM comes form AOSP, built from the Google source. As it relies on _NO_ HTC investment, it's interest is self motivated. This point in time is a perfect example of this potential: right now CM is running on Gingerbread .... and rather stable as well. The various devs decide how interested they are in a new release and put their hours in accordingly .... and they are beholden to no one as to what feature-set or build they will work on. AOSP's greatest weakness: hardware must be reverse engineered .... which can sometimes mean AOSP (an thus CM) are not always feature complete out the gate. In a world wherer every new cell phone is slapping on some new hardware feature ... this can be a bad thing to have a ROM that never supports "hardware feature X" until 6 months after the product is on the shelves.

Right there is the big divide. This is the heart of most people's love not for CM ... but for AOSP in general when these discussions start. On the upside you have things like WiMAX support .... which is 8 months late to the game but now that it's here .... every 4G phone from here on forward will leverage so the wait will never be there again. On the downside you have things like HDMI .... which still have no support. To Sense user, CM is "late to the party". To a an AOSP user, they see the pointless waiting for HTC to release Gingerbread as the making Snese "Late to the party", too.

Both sides think the other is behind the times.

Now I will declare that AOSP > Sense. That should end the debate, and I'm awesome enough to to make such declarations and have them stick. The reality is that no gimmicky hardware limitation that may put AOSP behind is worth boasting about as it's likely never getting wide-spread market apps and thus needs someone from AOSP to go in and roll out an open standard version of the system so developers will touch it anyway (read: HDMI). Whats more, is that a community of enthusiasts is not driven by the bottom line .... so as has been demonstrated with Gingerbread and to larger extent a phone like the Nexus One: a good user base will extend the lifespan of your phone WELL BEYOND anything Sense will ever get you.

Again, AOSP > Sense. But what of CM specifically?

CM is somewhat the major gravitational force of operational development so like it or not when people say AOSP, they think of CM. CM itself reflects this. There are a TON of little tweaks buried in the settings, but other than an ADW Launcher swap, the main UI _looks_ very stock launcher. To a _user_, CM looks terrible. Like ass, really. A user doesn't really care about power or flexibility. They care that when they hit the menu button they are greeted with for generic boxes and a more button so additional generic boxes can pop up. The entire OS _feels_ dry. Comming from a ROM like Sense where everything has been polished (even if only at the surface), this can make the whole ROM seem like a put off. They wont care about the tweaks you can do... or the potential of AOSP .... they are too busy looking at the driest launcher they've ever seen ... then noticing there's no WiMAX/HDMI (yet) and moving on.

There's lots of fun little tweaks in CM ... but IMO the biggest problem with CM is that it still *looks* like stock android for the most part, which is not suitable for everyday use IMO. Give Apple credit where it's due: putting polish on the UI matters. CM has NONE (blinkie light settings don't cut it). Heck Honeycomb even demonstrates that Google is figuring this out. I would never flash off of CM if it wasn't for the horrendous UI, especially now that it has WiMAX (roll it into the nightlies already guys... seriously!)

So in summary: CM is a diamond in the rough. it's a friggen diamond, tough as ****, a pedigree in AOSP meaning it's not going anywhere and will likely be your ROM of choice for EVO eventually anyway, but no one bothered to cut it so it doesn't sparkle and will never garner any casual attention, nor make it on your GFs phone because it's just ugly.