Well let me start off by saying that I'm completely new to the Android community. I've fought the transition to the smartphone era for years and finally caved in after my last basic cell splash down into the bottom of my toilet. Anyhow I'm a proud owner of a modest 16GB Droid Razr XT912 mainly because I'm cheap and I wanted to give the crooks over at the Big Red Machine as little of my hard earned money as possible which I will concede is basically impossible to do, they'll rob you blind no matter how hard you try I'll assure you of that!
I'm new to the android community but by no means am I new to the world of hacking into my electronics to get the best out of its capabilities. In fact there's essentially nothing electronically in my home I haven't tried to crack into before including my TVs, media players, computers, the kids i-touches, and xboxes. Hell if I could hack into my microwave I think I would! So it was only natural when I got my smartphone my 1st instinct was to ask myself.. I wonder what she's capable of doing and how can I get all this junkware off of it that Verizon was forcing on me and wasting my resources with? After doing a quick google search I'd landed on this wonderful little forum and quickly familiarized myself with process of rooting and flashing my phone. Which lead me here to creating this post because it quickly occurred to me that there were a lot of options out there when it came to ROMs choices and other developments but there was no definitive answer on which one was the best or most popular. Which at the time of picking the 1st one I wanted to try a very difficult one. My thoughts being as a newcomer what I would like to try is what's considered the consensus best and if I choose to do so work my way through the rest afterwards.
So for the sake of newbies like myself I hope everyone take a moment to participate in the survey and maybe mention what type of equipment you're working with. The poll was comprised from the that 24v created so if I missed any forgive me and please let me know. Since there are so many candidates out there I won't just add it to the list until there are several request for it.
I feel this poll is a good idea but it may not get you to your end destination, so to speak. I honestly do not think me giving you my favorite ROM will really help you, but I feel perhaps a break down of the different bases will be of greater use.
I'd like to say first of all, in my humble opinion, you cannot go wrong with any ROM on this site. I give mad props to all the Devs here who put in hours and hours of work. I'm far from an expert so if I've made any mistakes in my descriptions I urge anyone to please correct me.
Blur based ROMs:
The most bug free. What you sacrifice in options you gain in stability. Pretty much everything works on them. They are de-bloated to different extents and filled with sexy tweaks implemented by the Devs to improve battery life and performance. They generally tend to run much better than stock in my opinion. You can't go wrong with these ROMs.
AOKP/CM9 ICS based ROMs:
Almost bug free. Extremely de-bloated. Things like buggy screen auto-rotation (when changing the orientation of your phone it causes the screen image to become small before it actually switches over to the proper size and orientation. Sort of a choppy transition rather than a smooth fluid one), cropped screen shots, laggy home screen transitions (a workaround for this is to turn off wallpaper scrolling), and no HDMI out are some of the more annoying bugs for me personally. However, if you can get past the bugs, these ROMs offer very high customization such as customizable pull-down notifications and battery icons, long pressing of the volume rocker to skip music tracks, and fine tuned adjustments of the auto-brightness settings to name a few. Both AOKP and CM9 generally run extremely fast with excellent battery life. AOKP offers a few more options in the customization department but CM9 offers customizable lock screen hotseats so you can choose your unlock shortcuts.
AOKP/CM10 Jelly Bean based ROMs:
Fixes some bugs in AOKP/CM9 ICS. These ROMs are extremely snappy, buttery smooth, and have all the AOKP/CyanogenMod customization. However, they still suffer from buggy auto-rotation and introduce a couple of new bugs, such as not being able to send or receive MMS (using a 3rd party SMS/MMS app such as Handcent or Go SMS seems to fix this issue) and the camera flash being out of sync with the camera, causing dark pics in low light scenarios. In my opinion, they are definitely daily drivable ROMs as the pros outweigh the cons by a wide margin.
Kexec ROMs:
This is an option you did not include in your poll. I personally have not used any Kexec ROMs. These ROMs are available in AOSP, AOKP, and CyanogenMod flavors. What makes them different is that the locked boot loader is bypassed allowing custom kernels to be used. These ROMs tend to have the most bugs. The biggest being no deep sleep (this issue may have been fixed by now) and a non-working camera, but I've read they are still very awesome ROMs with great performance and battery life. Hopefully Dhacker and Hashcode will get the few kinks worked out sooner or later. A BIGTIME shoutout goes out to them because without them, we'd have much less options if any at all.
Hope this helps.