Same boat, waiting for 1.0, now worried I’ll miss the boat entirely, but I’m not going to buy their early access for that fear mongering. They made millions, they can ensure their game lives on one way or another.
Use nova for years, but never found an of the features beneficial. I’ve been using One UI since moving to the s24u and I have noticed no real difference in functionality.
I used to install custom roms all the time back before knox on Samsung, now I cannot be bothered, usually something in the roms does not work among other bugs, it takes too long to keep up to date on rooting stuff etc, the support for roms is abysmal. I started to lose interest around the time banking apps started detecting root and not working, there were ways around it with magisk but it was complicated and could not find decent documentation on it.
It just became simpler to use what’s out of the box and the newer phones I started buying had very little in the way of custom roms to start with.
It’s not even released yet, its still being developed.