Giving MIUI a shot. It's pretty big but the stuff it comes with seems generally useful -- a file manager that will show all the images/apk's/whatever on the SD card, for example.
The default theme's too bright for my tastes, but its auto-brightness settings seem much dimmer than the previous ROMs I've used, so that's probably good for the battery. Tried to grab a dark theme but haven't had any luck yet (the theme manager crashed once, and now it's just downloading really slowly).
It's also really aggressive on security -- it's probably the most thorough, granular system I've ever seen as far as security permissions. It doesn't just tell you what information an app is going to ask for at install time, it does it at execution time, too, and offers you the option to prompt every single time it attempts to access private data. Trust the Chinese to bake that kind of paranoia into their OS.
The version of Sprint VVM I had crashed at runtime, which I found out is a known issue with ICS/Jellybean ROMs. I found
an ICS version that works.
The absence of an app drawer is vexing, particularly the part about dragging-and-dropping launchers across different workspaces.
Anyway, not bad for a start. My favorite so far is straight-up vanilla CM7; I'll probably try out a modified-for-my-phone CM10 next, but I'm likely to stick with this for a few weeks anyway.
EDIT: Weather seems to think I'm in some place called Temperanceville. That's not a DYAC on me typing in "Tempe", either; that's what it automatically set itself to from my location.
I'm trying to fix it but it currently says
Hot city
no city that you want to query
I greatly appreciate the oriental wisdom but I still have to live here, phone.
EDIT 2: Still getting the "You haven't accessed the Google Play Store app on your device" error even though I've been using it for like an hour. Irritating; it's much quicker to queue app installations from my desktop.