Reflashing a phone is scary and weird when you do it the first time, but it's really not hard and the community support is quite good. You're right -- it's not

Reflashing a phone is scary and weird when you do it the first time, but it's really not hard and the community support is quite good. You're right -- it's not hard. Just annoying and possibly risky. A lot of these ROMs are alpha/beta quality and not fully tested. For example I installed a JB ROM on my Galaxy Nexus 4G that broke my GPS. I didn't even realize it until I was lost and needed GPS to find my way back to the highway. Most of these ROMs (none yet?) have OTA updating so once you flash you are committing yourself to maintaining it going forward. So for example if there's some horrible security problem you may never get patched unless you seek it out yourself. This brings up the issue of installing software from untrusted sources. Cyanogenmod is fine but what about all the others? Call me old fashion but I don't enjoy flashing random ROMS I find on web forums. Seems like that could end really poorly. The final annoyance that gets me every time is these different ROM releases often require you to wipe system data. So you have to use something like Titanium Backup, which has a UI similar to the cockpit of a 747, to back things up yourself. On my first attempt to do this I accidentally restored 'system data' or something like that which borked my phone up really well. I had to repeat the whole process of wiping and starting over. The other gripe is when TB reinstalls apps you have to sit there and hit install/done about a million times. Even as a technical user I just don't want to deal with it but I still do want the latest OS release. I even foolishly bought a Galaxy Nexus thinking I wouldn't have to deal with it anymore but I didn't buy the right Galaxy Nexus that gets updates from Google. Silly me.