I remember flashing my Moto Razr with de-Verizon software. That was the most nerve wracking thing I did at that point. I was NOT techy. Thought I was going to brick that phone. 

 A lot of things have fallen into place the last year or two.

A usable voice to text keyboard, for example. That app is "Voice Input" from FUTO software. 

 is there still no other option but Gooble phones to run full modded OSs yet? Motorola still lets you unlock the bootloader but they don't release adequate documentation so there's no modded OS to run on it. Sad because their Defy phones are bulletproof. 

 Murena phones, Simple Phone and BraX2 phones all ship without Googled OS or apps.

They run AOSP (Android Open Source Project), and they may pre install a way to get Play Store apps, but you don't have to install those. 

 BraX2 came with a 4 year old insecure kernel and equally unimpressive hardware. These are the trade offs that I'm talking about. The vast majority of the people don't want to gimp their mobile experience. 

 The vast majority of people are retarded, psychotic and deluded. Let's focus on those people who actually matter. The ones with the capacity for original thought. Those ones can be taught about things like opsec and mass surveillance. They are born every day. There is millions of them out there. Stop pandering to the gimped minds.