I am the administrator of the system on my phone. It's the same OS as what I've been using on my PCs for decades, so it's very familiar. It's fully scriptable in whatever language I wish to use, so I can easily adjust its behavior. I can use sandboxes when I need them and ignore them when I don't. Its software components are replaceable and patchable - if something bothers me, I can write a patch, compile a patched package, install it and even send a merge request upstream right on the phone itself without using any other device - regardless of whether it's about desktop environment behavior, cellular middleware or a kernel driver. I can freely modify the system to my liking without being punished for it. I never have to wrestle with the system whenever I want to keep something running in the background.
It just feels like my little personal computer. No Android device ever felt this way to me. I don't want to feel like a guest confined to a sandbox within a computing device I'm supposed to own.
If you have selinux then you may not be "absolute God either", and arguably it's never necessary to have that much control. I would much prefer to have sane security boundaries so something blowing up won't bring everything down with it.
And there are quite a few devices with unlockable bootloaders so you can feel to hack whatever you want with AOSPs.
I had to build a patched Android image in the past, so no thanks, it's definitely not something I would want to do in my spare time just to tinker. It's a system that's designed to be user-hostile; you can fight it if you want, but why would I do that if I can just keep using GNU/Linux instead?
Is it user hostile, or more complex as in a car is also more complex than a bicycle for obvious benefits?
It is more complex, but mostly for reasons that serve someone else than me.
@seba_dos1 Whom do those reasons serve, specifically?
Google?
The Open Source knife cuts both ways, I'm afraid. You Purism crusaders sure are selective in its application.