Same here, there was a time when I couldnt go without a funky as rom that promised X speed improvements, you had to do all this long SD card partition and changing to EXT4 to get the best speed, then doing other things.
With a Nexus device and 4.2 I don't need the hotkey in the notification area as it has that so the only thing I would really need is the expanded volume. I might change some Kernels but I basically stick with stock Google, as that's what I mainly put on my S2 anyways. A lot of the battery life and speed comes from Kernels and moving junk, so since we have no junk
. But yes I look forward to a phone which is similar to something like the iPhone I had were apart from jailbreak and a few minor changes I didn't need to do much (I did change themes often as iOS is a turd in software design deparment).