The light leakage issue is unacceptable. And I've seen people get hit by this over and over again even in their replacement phone. But this was really due to a bad batch. Depending on your region, it might have been the only batch received, which is why the replacements had the same problem. You got unlucky. I got my Evo in early June, and it did not have any hardware issues: no light leakage, no mushy power button, etc, no loose charge port, etc.
Battery life is not horrendous; the phone is just configured to use a lot of juice with its default configuration. This is the equivalent of LCD TVs set at full brightness/contrast when you buy them. It's been proven that if you make the appropriate settings, the battery life is significantly increased, and the life is comparable to other high-end smart phones. If yours is not up to snuff (not getting a full day), do some more research on battery saving tips.
Then there's the issue of the features of the Evo being superior to other phones; in particular: true multitasking, active GPS, 4G. The evo (android) does these things better than any other phone, but it comes with a cost, more battery drain. For the average user, I think the solution would be to equip the evo (and other androids) with a higher capacity stock battery (like a larger gas tank in an SUV) so it feels like you're getting more battery life. Also, an inclusion of a better sync/task manager would be nice; it would show ALL apps that pull data in the background, so you can make sure you catch and disable them.
30FPS is a huge limitation for me, but I've talked to enough people to know that some people can't perceive the difference between 30fps and 60fps. For me, it's night and day, and makes the evo feel really clunky and unpolished, especially next to the Apple products. Unfortunately the only way to get around it is to hack the kernel. HTC got lazy and didn't figure out how to preserve 60fps and allowing HDMI out. Maybe if they didn't try to crank out 69 phones every year and focused on a few good products, this would be a non-issue.
But I still think that overall, the Evo is an excellent device. I love playing with it, and it's the first phone I've ever owned where I feel like I have to keep tinkering with it to see what else it's capable of. So for me, it's a bit hard to put myself in the shoes of someone who's just using the phone to make calls, text, surf the internet, and play mp3s (not saying this is your usage pattern). Cause this machine can do some crazy things way beyond typical smartphone usage.
