aww come on I was so hyped for a better performing mid ranger and that's all we got.

I thought I'm worse off with my 5 year old Poco F1 which only has a half-day battery and I average a 3 hour SOT each charge session. I am quite surprised that the battery is worse as I expected the Tensor G2 to be more efficient than the SDM845.

Although I love the Pixel 8's OS and design and want to love it Unfortunately $699 for midrange performance aint worth the money for me. I can find a used S23 for $650 with better value hardware-wise but the thing stopping me is OneUI and bloat.

I believe this is gruvbox

More like Bing AI integration with Bixby and yeah, nobody would care that much.

Oppo Reno 2. Has everything you asked except for the removable battery. My aunt's been using for 4 years and the cameras are really good. Cons are: EOL, it's pretty old and has ColorOS if you do mind.

In true mediatek fashion

Nooooo. I always use this when the wide angle lens is not wide enough.

Maybe will consider doing that on my Poco F1 (which is spoofed as a Pixel XL) once I get a new daily driver

I think of them as "design" company, although they are really an aesthetics company. They simply make bog-standard devices with outstanding aesthetics and "features" and custom icon/widget packs for the Pixel Launcher that ships with the phone, for people that want something "different". I have always contemplated the innovative-ness of the glyph system and if it even makes the phone experience any better.

To addon, it straight up refuses to work on AMD PCs, so I had to painstakingly borrow an Intel machine to completely free my Poco F1 from the shackles of Xiaomi.

Would only buy a Xiaomi as a daily driver if MIUI Global isn't actually just bloatware and adware.