Yeah you have bad experience because you bought a bad phone. There are also expensive phones that aren't great and it's not really about the price - it's about searching for a well made model.
You can do your research and buy a great cheap phone.
There are many very good Android phones that aren't as expensive and at the time you bought your Eris there also were some very decent mid-ends
I bought a phone that was a few times cheaper than most expensive smartphones at that time and actually turned out to be better. I did my research but was also lucky because it exceeded my expectation with community support. And that is also because people who do their research are usually led to buy similar things. You can even tell a lot by looking at basic specs, and I don't mean looking just at processor speed numbers but looking at the device as a whole.
I was the first person on here that was amazed with the Galaxy S the day it was announced (probably because Casey dislikes Samsungs
) and it turned out to be a huge hit, something I really expected to happen.
It's about "Value for money" and you can have it in the high end and mid end.
You can buy an expensive phone that turns out to be "meh" or one that turns out to be awesome but the same thing applies to lower end phones. After all phones that we consider as "mid-end Androids" are still high ends looking at the phone market overall and even I - the "tech geek" don't need the fastest and most awesome device because its display is 5% bigger or processor is 10% faster. There are very good phones that aren't "top of the pack". It's just that your past phone wasn't good