I know that the thread is old (being most of a year ago is tricky for the ones that read just the start of the date but in this topic got amazed how much improved things with time.

Got my phone more or less by the time this thread started, and did a lot of tests, installs, configurations and so on with time, so was getting a bit of garbage all around.

Last week decided for a mostly fresh restart, and reflashed, applied pr1.3, powerkernel, cssu, n900tuneup and swappolube (but not restored configurations, in fact deleted most "." dirs in user home), and got amazed how fast it felt compared with my memories of the start, and how much i can abuse battery, seeing that it can last more than a day even with that.

So my answer for the original question is the community, participating, keeping in touch with what is going here, testing things and helping if you can. You will be surprised with how much better device you will have thanks to that.