Re: The single failure with all "Flagship" these phones..
"What use is a Quad HD screen, apart from killing my battery?"
To be honest, I watch movies on my S5 Mini. At night, phone on chest, SD-purchased movie, it looks just fine. When I'm reading web pages, I can't see a single pixel, no matter how hard I try. Whether that's aliasing or just sheer screen res, I don't really care.
At the kinds of distances these things are used, even HD isn't worth the effort (in fact, I save a few quid by only ever buying the SD-version, because I can't tell the difference and because the stream-bandwidth is less if I do that).
Same with quite a lot of the specs nowadays. As you say, the things that matter don't seem to change. I don't care about ultra-thinness. I'll happily have a slab in my pocket if it provides benefit. I don't care about ultra-light-weight. Sometimes it's nice to know the phone is in my pocket and you can't really go mad anyway given the single criteria "phone-sized". I'd rather have a thicker, heavier phone with longer battery, more ports, and more oomph (but not much, because pretty much the phone I have does everything I need at the speed I need it to) than edge-to-edge screens, HD screens, 4K screens, entirely-touch screens,ultra-thin screens, and no way to plug the damn thing into the things I want.
To be honest, even the mini-micro-nano-SIM / mini-micro-nano-SD junk drives me mad. Just give me the big slot and if the card I want to plug in is too small, I'll put an adaptor on it. I can't do that the other way around, plugging a big SIM into a nano-SIM slot.
Oh, and dual, triple, quad SIM while you're there. Gimme a Nokia-style brick, with modern hardware and all the trimmings. Then I'll consider it worth paying more than a couple of hundred quid for.