yeah, I know not everyone wants everything. But the beauty of it is, that you are not restricted to what one company thinks is good. Some may want ID3-Database based browsing, others want directory browsing, still others would like to have both. Rockbox has both. Rockbox also has other advantages over the sandisk firmware. For example they can play apple itunes files (when not DRM protected) without reencoding them. This is good, because it is a well known fact that every lossy reencoding degrades the sound quality. So when your source is already lossy, you probably don’t want to reencoding at all.
Almost every added feature is more or less a matter of taste. But at least the features are available. Some have a copy of the wikipedia on their mp3-players. I wouldn’t say that an mp3 player is the perfect device to read stuff, but at least you could do it if you like. If you know something about c programming and you are willing to spend some time on it, you can implement whatever feature the hardware allows. And that’s a lot.
About the warranty issues: in theory that could be a problem. But google a bit about that. There don’t seem to be people that ever experienced a problem (once the firmware is outside of development status and well tested). The only critical feature is most of the time the dualboot itself, because when thats done, you can use the original firmware to restore the flash. After restoring it to its unmodified state nobody can tell if there ever was another firmware on it. And dualboot is already stable on the player.
