Personally
I prefer phones that track vanilla Android and if they customize at all then they do so with a light touch. There might have been reason to customize back in the 2.x age, but Android has a perfectly usable vanilla experience these days. Aside from bringing consistency to the platform it also increases the likelihood of firmware updates because there is less stuff in the custom firmware to maintain and test each time.
Probably the best near-vanilla experience would be something like Cyanogenmod. Lots of minor changes here and there but close enough to track and merge AOSP. Even CM have dumped some of their apps and tweaks, presumably because the core functionality has improved sufficiently to render them unnecessary.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
