Most of what I've seen have been reasonable and fair assessments of what works and what doesn't. Fact is, some people are getting better battery life than others - to be honest there are way to many factors involved. Wifi, Bluetooth, GPS, Facebook, syncing, kernel's, bloat, frozen apps, apps installed, etc - these will all affect battery in one way or another.
As for newcomers being blinded and flashing to brick - that's a bit extreme; ANYONE wanting to flash their phone needs to do their due diligence and then ascertain if flashing is for them. Some people have opted not to based on what they've read, others have opted to anyways and have had varying levels of success. As for as phones being bricked, I've only seen/read of a few soft bricks which of course are recoverable from. I think by far and large the biggest reason for bricked phones is user inattention and inability to follow directions.
That being said, I followed what I posted in this OP to the letter and then installed the ICS kernel after and my phone is just fine. Yes I have a mainly functioning ICS. Yes there are bugs (listed in OP). Yes I've found and installed workarounds for most of them (also listed in OP). Yes there are a few that still need fixes but for my case, this is a pretty stable pre-leak ICS that I am more than comfortable using on my Rogers I727R as a daily driver.
I'm on the I727R from Rogers as well, and I stand by my evaluations. It's not perfect by any means but I've listed/found fixes for most issues that affect me... and as I've mentioned and posted, the battery life seems about the same as it was for me on stock GB rom and kernel. Maybe it was better on faux's kernel but I never ran that on GB so I can't compare.
