High Midrange or old Top Range. £450 - £850 ish.

I went from a LG G3 to OnePlus 3T to a Xiaomi K30 Ultra (variant of a Poco F2 Pro, Chinese ROM). My partner went from and old iPhone to the same. Loved the phone and the pop up camera, but the Chinese ROM, and in many aspects, Xiaomi bloatware drove us batty. Awful user experience. Is their Global ROM also rubbish?

Now it's time for a new phone, I liked Xiaomi bang for buck but I'm wary of its software experience on their global devices (does Google assistant work out the box? Does clicking on a link in a browser route you to their horrible GetApps store? Does G maps locations work? Do they lock out custom launchers? Do notifications and syncing get pushed correctly or does the battery Optimizer aggressively shut all things down in the background?)

Our priority list as follows:

1. AMOLED 6.5 - 6.7 inch
2. Great camera, ideally with a telephoto
3. Waterproof
4. Not too plasticy a build
5. A smooth android experience with minimal bloatware
6. Not flagship prices but mid tier, to mid upper tier.
7. She wants a pretty colour like purple

So my question is, what phones should be on my radar?

Current list:

Pixel 7 / pro (8 I think is too pricey, but that phone is my personal benchmark)

OPPO Reno 10+ (also a bit steep but she wants the purple)

OnePlus 12 (how's the camera? I loved my 3T but have heard they aren't as good as they used to be)

S22+ or S22 Ultra refurbed (cons a year old but has purple an IP68 is it a better pick than the OPPO?)

Xiaomi 12T or similar, suggestions?

Realme GT5 pro looks sick, but I have Chinese ROM ptsd

Thanks for advice. My phone knowledge is a bit rusty and their must be a bunch out there that I would never think to look at.

I just noticed their instance pop up in the feddit browser and they are huge and established. Who are they? Whats the vig? Should I join some of their communities or do they have a particular agenda they're pushing?

I've noticed in the explosion that we are getting duplicate communities in multiple instances. This is ultimately gonna hinder community growth as eventually communities like 'cats' will exist in hundreds of places all with their own micro groups, and some users will end up subscribing to duplicates in their list.

A: could we figure out a system to let our communities know about the duplicates as a sticky so that users can better find each other?

B: I think this is the best solution, could a 'super community' method be developed under which communities can join or be parented to under that umbrella and allow us to subscribe to the super community under which the smaller ones nest as subs? This would allow the communities to stay somewhat fractured across multiple instances which can in turn protect a community from going dark if a server dies, while still keeping the broader audience together withing a syndicated feed?