[mancerayder]

Samsung hardware + custom ROMs are a path I took in the past (with the S4 Active, which by the way was waterproof and had a replaceable battery, but somehow never achieved tremendous popularity).

But yeah, it's something worth thinking about. The major appeal of a phone like the Pixel is less the hardware than the vanilla aspect of the Android OS.

All another hardware vendor has to do is attempt to stay up to date, and minimize their own bloatware if that's a bottleneck in their time allocation allotment. I'm surprised no one sees that a lot of Android users clamor for a vanilla, up-to-date Android OS phone.