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I drive a PHEV (Ford C-Max) and I don't get the claim that it's anemic. It spins the tires just fine taking off, and I've never felt it was short of power except the couple times I tried to quickly get up to highway speeds in 'EV Only' mode. But running in EV Only mode at highway speeds uses the battery too fast anyway. It's better to use gasoline to go fast and electricity to go slow unless I was expecting to have enough electricity to do the whole trip. You can still put it in 'EV Now' which will mostly use the battery but turn on the engine when you need it for acceleration.

Combustion maintenance intervals are doubled on the PHEV vs a conventional gas only vehicle. And the transaxle shouldn't require any service (although Ford had some manufacturing defects and a recently got a new one under warranty).

Battery manufacturing improvements would improve a PHEV too. Smaller batteries would take up less storage space (C-Max design is suboptimal) or allow for a bigger EV range with the same volume.