ICS brought significant boost in UI speed/smoothness from GB. Also the current top phones are way more powerful than old Evo and upcoming Jelly Bean will bring additional speed bump over ICS. If you don't like TW or Sense, use Nova or Apex. They are very smooth.
You need to take thread like this with big grain of salt and try it out yourself before making judgement. If you are coming from old Evo, I'm pretty sure you will be blown away by screen speed of this phone.
I understand what you're saying and I would fully expect more power out of phones today vs a phone from 2 years ago. What i am saying is that the problem discussed in this thread is the same problem i've had on my Evo and is the same problem they are talking about in the LTE Evo forum. This makes me believe that its an android problem and not a phone problem. This shouldve already been fixed and the old "android solution" of using a third party app to go around the problem is getting old. I shouldnt have to do that, and from the post in this thread they dont seem to work.
S-Voice is a bloody waste of time too - has anyone actually found any use for it yet? I had a iPhone 4S (for about 2 months grrrrr!) and Siri was just as pointless...