Thanks I will check that out. I didn't even know ASUS made a phone other than the ROG phones.
I was looking at the Razer Phone 2 right after I made this thread, though from the look of Razer's site they are already ready to abandon it, assuming they have yet not. Also, it appears the ROG phones also have the front firing speakers.
As to sticking with something familiar, that isn't the issue. If familiarity were my goal, I would have changed carriers and stuck with HTC phones after my ONE M9 died. I have used an HTC phone since 2008, their first party apps for things like ringtone trimming and photo editing were so seamless and fluid that I just assumed every Android device was like that... It was actually quite jarring when I bought my Pixel 2 XL to find that the default music player didn't have baked in ringtone trimming, or that I couldn't just edit a picture with a Photoshop like experience in the camera app.
I have said that a rear or down firing loud speaker is a design flaw since the days of yore, before actual smartphones, when people were ohh'ing and ahh'ing over phones that could barely double as an MP3 player (looking at you OG Moto Razer). Hell, before that... my first cellphone which was before 3g was a thing had the speakerphone speaker on the back of the phone, which at the time I considered a design flaw, though not critical, as the phone couldn't even display more than 6 digits of a phone number without scrolling the monochrome LCD display. The moment you add video playback to a device, a speaker that does not fire in the direction of the viewer becomes a critical design flaw.
I may be overreacting a bit on labeling the notch and holepunch as critical design flaws, they are really just compromises to remove bezels. Though the only people I know that asked for smaller bezels on their phones are the executives and engineers whose job it is to come up with ways to maximize the profitability of a design.
Also for the record, I am not a fan of curved displays, it feels like a design move specifically intended to defeat screen protectors and maximize the likelihood of you needing to replace your device.