Unfortunately, by doing so you'll always rely on proprietary hardware blobs and hostile vendors who will make it harder to patch whatever you want to patch with

Unfortunately, by doing so you'll always rely on proprietary hardware blobs and hostile vendors who will make it harder to patch whatever you want to patch with each release in the name of "security" and will never offer anything close to an actual GNU/Linux experience on a phone. I also don't see how a process that requires rooting, patching etc, is any more prone to mainstream adoption than an actual Linux phone. The thing is, if one wants to move a cause somewhere, it may require some inconveniencing at the start for the long-term vision to pan out. Working with GCC was surely a bit painful at the start of the 90s, but it was worth it for the goal of having a free software stack on the desktop and now it's time to do the same for the phone.