I've had the Fossil hybrid HR for a few weeks now and you pretty much summarized all my thoughts, so I can't do anything but agree.
Could add that after the last update I was able to finally add a battery indicator to my watchface. So I had only todays date on my current watchface and when I tried adding the battery indicator the app forced me to enable location services to continue.
So I went in, enabled location services, added the battery indicator, went back in and disabled location services. Lo and behold, the battery indicator worked fine.
I don't get this obsession with location services unless they have some ulterior motive. It was equally hard to setup a fixed location in the weather app, easy to miss.
I was so happy with the Pebble Time until about a month ago when the battery quickly started deteriorating. I really miss that smartwatch. To me it's of the utmost importance to not need charging every single day and still be able to read notifications. In regards to the Apple Watch, I don't see any reason to have a high resolution image on my watch. It's a practical device.
It's sad that no one picked up the torch after Pebble.
Largely I'm happy with the Fossil HR because it's so practical. I'm sure a software update will bring me my Signal and Pushover notifications that I'm missing, in time.