You have a strange definition of "great." If any other phone exhibited those characteristics, I would write it off as garbage, not excuse its faults with a promise that they'll be fixed Real Soon Now™
So yeah, not flagship but close enough for a lot of people (side by side, the a32 vs s21, for me is not worth the 4x+ pricetag, as in the difference between flagship and not flagship is shrinking fast, ymmv), however...
The pinephone is worse hardware though (In almost all respects but the dipswitches) and the software, at this point, is really alpha quality mostly. But we know this: the promise it will run Linux smoothly on a phone is enough to buy one. It will take time but I would buy any phone that allows me to freely run multiple OSs new out of the box with all hardware supported.
According to https://wiki.postmarketos.org/wiki/Devices - that's a rather uncommon thing to have, and pretty much unobtainable for a recent device (other than pine64/librem5).
The fact that it has been admitted that 'it's slow, buggy, and flat out unreliable if you need to be able to receive / answer calls and texts for anything important' tells me that it is even worse than that 'Freedom Phone' since not only the PinePhone can't run the same apps as that, but it runs more sluggish than that.
I'd also write all of them off as garbage 'for now', since none of them can be recommended to the average Joe or Jane.
What use is a smartphone that claims to run apps (Native apps, Android apps or Web Apps) but runs them much worse than the user's previous device (or can't run them at all)? To the users hoping to make the switch, it feels more like a downgrade; especially PWAs.
For example, in the FAQ, Librem mentions:
> Unlike most mobile apps on Android and iOS, these applications were not written to monetize users' personal data or extract fees from users, and their code is free/open source, so it can be verified that they aren't spyware or contain code that acts against the best interest of their users.
Well it seems that Signal is a known and a widely recommended messaging app which generally doesn't do all the things claimed by Librem, yet many users that use Signal cannot even run it on their Librem 5 or PinePhone. So they will see no point in considering buying any of these phones anyway.
Therefore, these devices are still not ready yet to be considered serious alternatives to Android users or in general. They're going in the right direction, but it will take years of waiting for improvements in the current state of open source smart phones.
This is really a fault of Signal, because they forbid forks and do not provide a good app for GNU/Linux phones. It's like a walled garden. I do not use Signal for this reason.
Until then, these users are going to have to be waiting for years of improvements first before jumping onboard a product that they will see as 'unfinished' or 'sluggish' than their previous phone.