It will be interesting to see if OnePlus continues to fill this niche or evolves away from it.
It will be interesting to see if OnePlus continues to fill this niche or evolves away from it.
However, they will surely continue making phones at that price on which the pure version of Cyanogenmod can be installed.
Xiaomi seems very promising since they also make phones at that price point with similar specs, and Cyanogenmod ROMs are in development. I know it might be hard to get them in the US, but in Europe they can even be ordered from Amazon.
Having done the search you recommended, it sounds like the story is best told in the other direction: CyangenMod signed an exclusive deal with one of OnePlus's competitors for the Indian market, totally screwing them over in India, making them forced to release their device there without CyanogenMod. If they are also now dropping support for Cyanogen everywhere due to this (which isn't clear), I honestly could not blame them: a better telling of the story is "sadly it looks like CyanogenMod is moving away from OnePlus".
OnePlus (or Micromax) actually very recently announced a replacement for Cyanogenmod 11S: https://forums.oneplus.net/threads/rom-official-5-0-android-...
I somehow still don't understand how they will be able to include Google Apps without being a member of the Open Handset Alliance when shipping an almost exact fork of Android.(http://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2013/10/googles-iron-grip-on-...)
So no. Motorola are not doing a fine job with this. Just a shame that they're still able to coast by on the good reviews, from before they broke the otherwise excellent phone.
It would seem that the problem is due to overly aggressive memory management that was never properly adjusted for 1GiB RAM. One would hope that the popularity of the G and other small memory Android devices would help push for more efficient memory usage rather than requiring 2GiB+ for a decent experience. For starters, it would be nice if more of the core system was implemented in native code (ART doesn't count).