Consumers wouldn't. But that means lost sales in extra batteries.
And many HTC owners, especially on Verizon, now accept that as a fact of life.
Stock battery, stock rooted rom, bloatware removed (Sprint allows that on unrooted phones, get with the program Verizon!!) and running full Sense 3 at the stock clock - 18 hours of light / medium use, 50% battery left, and no whacko battery tricks. Leaves me plenty of reserve to overclock to 1.5 GHz (and match or surpass Exynos CPU (not GPU) performance.
At first I felt guilty trying to nudge that in when I repeated that on a mostly-Verizon thread, but I am saying this so you cats get the info you need to stand up for your consumer rights.
Sprint lets you remove the bloatware (most or all depending upon model) without rooting. It's your memory and it's your paid bandwidth used by bloatware to phone home, and I don't care if it does it a nanosecond per fortnight - correct answer is zero.
Sprint provides warranty coverage on rooted phones. For hardware faults or software faults that persist after you flash back to stock, no questions. The idea that rooters break phones and can't be trusted is old Kool Aide that has been thoroughly debunked.
If Sprint can specify a top-end HTC phone like mine that gets great battery life thanks to a reasonable hardware spec and consumer empowerment over the configuration then that proves it's totally doable.
I advise Verizon customers to stand up and demand value and consumer rights.
Verizon is doing it wrong and adds insult to injury by charging extra for it.