Just to give a counter-anecdote: I still use a 1st gen Moto G. I previously had a mid-range HTC and a low-end Samsung phone. The Moto G is without doubt the best Android phone I owned so far.

I have Moto G 1st gen, and the phone app starts instantly, loads fully in around 1sec. You probably have some malware running, or forgot to close all the apps in the background.

Strange – I'm reading this on my first gen Moto E. I see occasional lag, mostly in web content, but generally I think it works great.

I use the first Moto G LTE they came out with. (The specs really don't change much from phone to phone.) It works for me the only other phone I've used before it was a Galaxy S III US Version.

At first it had a horrible bug that unloaded apps all the time. I and many others assumed the 1GB of RAM was the culprit. It wasn't. Unfortunately, we had to wait for the Lollipop update for it to get fixed.

If it weren't for the firmware issues and the fact that they waited so long to fix it I would buy another Motorola/Lenovo phone to replace it. Since it broke sometime ago.