It doesn't sound like your torn at all, if you think DDG still feels year behind Google, despite Google's results degrading. Sounds like you still think Google is a lot better.
No, quite the opposite. To clarify: this is the first time I've started using DDG on multiple devices and it's stuck. I'll rephrase: I think that DDG is still a few years behind Google's unadorned best-effort result set, but not that far behind Google's actual presentation today. I.e. Google's degraded itself so much as to make the competition viable for this search user.