It sounds like you just like the quality of their product.

Apple does let you use the phone as you want to.

They just didn’t design it to do the things you say you’d prefer. I assume that you wouldn’t have made the trade off if you didn’t think it was worth it.

Liking a product enough to buy while wanting it to be designed a little differently is what we do with almost all purchases.

That is pretty much the opposite of living in a communist dictatorship.

iSH is really great, and is a must - and so would several other app which can’t exist here.

The point here is that you can actually get everting you want, just not with Apple’s design.