That the missing headphone jack, while unfortunate, was outweighed by other merits of the phone?

Unfortunately the "vote with $" is very imprecise.

With respect to the headphone jack, a purchase of the phone could be anywhere from "I enthusiastically agree" to "I disagree strongly enough that it almost prevented my purchase" or even "I thought it would be OK, but realized after purchase that I will not buy another phone without a headphone jack."

"Voting with your wallet" is such an imprecise message that I wish people would stop bringing it up. It doesn't work. Customers choose out of the available options, so the real choice is with those who decide what options are available.

In theory if there's a choice missing that consumers would prefer, some other company will step in and fill the void knowing customers will prefer their new offering.

In theory, yes. And it works for the easy things. But one does not simply walk into expensive electronics sector. Between capital requirements for product development and for marketing, it's really hard to make a viable product. People do try - there have been some bottom-up efforts for creating smartphones with features missing from the mainstream (ranging from security to customizability to openness), but they mostly failed.

What I'm saying is - voting with your wallet works for products where it's easy for a random entrepreneur to design a release a new, unique model focusing on unmet market needs. But smartphones are not such a product. Customers always choose out of available options, the difference is in how easy is for the market to iterate on different variants for different market subsegments.

Any conclusion after that? :)

I wish there was a viable alternative. Moving to Android after years and years of purchasing apps and setting my digital life up around apple's ecosystem makes that a nonstarter. It's platform lock-in.

And, I'm not about to stall at a particular model, since I know quite well that the headphone jack isn't likely to come back.

I've switched after 4S [1]. Yes, the lack of bought apps and general apps selection (3 years ago) was pretty disappointing. But I bought a few apps and games, navigation, set up office, video and music as subscriptions and it is working pretty fine. The point is - I've invested like 50$ to 100$ unreturnable overhead costs into Android to completely fill all my needs and and I have a backup iOS account filled with apps for a time when I want to switch back. Also it works on my tablet for now. Basically you can switch for cheap and then return a year or more after if you wish. Also consider that Android flagships cost 50%-75% of iPhone, (Sammy and Sony about the same).

[1] Battery life of new iPhones is not enough for me now and iOS can't function in low-tech, no internet environment where you need to share files and do other "geek" stuff suddenly and without PCs of any kind.