Way back in the day, I used to be one of those people who was constantly installing new custom ROMs. I loved trying out all the different varieties of Android created by passionate teams and fans (or sometimes even a single person) and discovering how they could improve the platform. It got to the point where I was choosing which of the best Android phones to buy based solely on whether or not it could be easily rooted and bootloader unlocked.
At some point, though, I started to back away from it all. Longer update commitments from OEMs, an increase in the number of unique features that a small development team couldn’t easily replicate, and a higher level of difficulty rooting/unlocking hardware pushed me away from the custom ROM community. At this point, I don’t even think about custom ROMs when looking at Android phones and tablets.