I've pretty much tried out all of the 2.1 ROMs that are currently out for our phone, and the two I keep going back to are Fresssh, and Damageless. I am currently on Damagecontrol 2.07, and I must say, your observations on the improvements are extremely accurate.
Battery - It's a night and day difference, i took my phone off the charger yesterday at 5am, stuck it back on about 5 minutes ago (14 hours), and it still had half a charge left on it! This is only with light to moderate usage though, with Live Wallpapers running the entire time, and all Syncs going to! Heavy testing will happen today, and I'll report back..
Lag - The only downside is the keyboard, it seems it has a tad bit more lag, coming from Damageless 1.0. This might be due to things like LWP running in the background and such. I haven't really took the time to play with the settings in Autokiller yet either, so we will see what we can come up with.
Wireless Tethering - I don't really have a use for this, but every time I tried it, out of curiosity, it worked flawlessly.
Apps Reinstall -
My only problem here is, no matter what ROM I am on, the 'Downloads' section of the market, doesn't list all of my previously installed applications, regardless of whether I've purchased them or not. Now,
they CAN all be found, on the Market, but for whatever reason, it doesn't list them in the downloads section.
Bluetooth File Transfer -
I'm glad this is working now, I can't understand why we didn't have it running in the first place, but then again, Android is still kinda new to me. I'm sure it has it's reasons.
Fresh 2.0d - The ONLY thing I couldn't get to work properly on this Rom, was LWP. For whatever reason, when I was using Android Home instead of Sense, it would always revert to stock wallpaper. AND there would be about a 5 second lag, from the time the phone was 'waking up', to the time you actually saw your home screen. During that time, all you could see, would be a black screen, and your notfications bar. During this time, the phone would be unresponsive.
EDIT: Fresh JUST released an update.zip that fixes the OpenGL issue we have with our LWP. Gonna flash now, and report back!
From what I understand, my results, on Fresh 2.0d
ARE NOT typical. I have searched and searched
, and haven't found/heard of anyone else having the same problem. So please, take that observation, with a grain of salt. Everything I have ever tried that Fresh has developed, has been nothing short of awesome.
Damageless 2.07 - The only bug I have come across, using this ROM, is it doesn't show al of your calendars. You CAN select them, in the list of calendars to show, BUT, using Pure Calendar Wdiget, for whatever reason, it doesn't show all of your calendars.
And for those of you, reading this thread, that are still on the fence, when it comes to flashing a 2.1 Rom, rooting , or anything talked about above, my advice to you is - TAKE THE LEAP, trust me, you will fall in love with your phone, all over again!
Hope this helps!