and I don't necessarily disagree with any particular point, it's just that you emphasize things that I wouldn't emphasize myself. I suppose it largely comes down to how you want to use this DAP. In my case, my listening is like 90 % albums and 10 % DJ sets. I cherish the album as an art form and artistic statement, which was from approximately Sgt. Peppers Lonely Hearts Club Band and thereafter taken to great heights especially from the late 60s to the 90s or so. I don't really care much about playlists, and actually I prefer that there is no wifi, no BT, no streaming in this device. I was reading some (all 5 star) reviews from the German Cayin retailer and they were all pretty much like "this one is great, and I use my other DAP for streaming". If you want to do "a bit of this and a bit of that" then this is not the all-rounder for that.
My use cases are actually pretty simple. I'm thinking like "hey I want to listen to The Doors now" and then I select it from the artist menu and pick one of the albums and start listening. Or maybe I'm not sure what I want to listen, then I just randomly go to some letter in the album menu and scroll a bit and then I find something that interests me right now (because I love my FLAC collection and I've curated it well, especially since the release of N3Pro which kind of pushed me that way). Then I listen to an album (or maybe a 1-2 hour DJ set) and look at the album cover art and probably press pause at some point and adjust the volume but that's all there is to it really. Of course, this needs to be reliable and consistent and I haven't encountered any system crashes or other such errors in my use (only since monday this week).
Of course there's things in the UI that could be nicer. Like the lack of search function, that one is kind of funny but I guess it's not really funny if you actually want to use one regularly. My googling seems to indicate that it was added in firmware 1.2 to the N3Pro, probably/hopefully something similar here. Also I'd want some way to personalize the UI a bit to add color/background image.