Paul Stamatiou wrote specifically about his experience with 4.2.

The author having not used Android 4 makes this a very poor analysis. I also hated Android <3.0 and loved iOS for years.

Then I bought S3 (and now S4) with Android 4.2 and the improvement was massive. Android only recently got their shit together (design & performance wise) and it's now very competitive with iOS. Arguably much better in favor of Android if you're a hacker.

Cyanogenmod is very easy to install. There's no reason to be locked into old versions because of your smartphone vendor (assuming you're moderately technically savvy).