Coming from a number of Pebbles, when the last one died it was a requirement for me by then that a smart watch should be able to always display the time.

Call me old fashioned if you must. I disabled gesture based display on (with night mode turning it off when asleep) as the first thing when I got the S3 Frontier, then sold it / upgraded to Watch later for improved battery life. It does at least 50% better and is faster as well.

Garmin watches also do well for displaying time, even better in fact, but they are a fair bit more expensive.