And you do realize the reason that the two custom ROM projects still exist today is because not many people are using them, right? Do you think the carrier would do nothing if custom ROM grows beyond being a niche and grandmas start talking about rooting their phones, which is purposefully locked by carriers? You think carriers lock their phone for fun and would not fight back when 50% of the customers would circumvent the lock?
This is like listing two dissident blog posts on the Chinese internet to argue that the Chinese government does not have total control of the people's life on the internet. You would not see these blog posts gain any real traction inside China because by that time a dozen people will be in jail and the intelligence of the great firewall will be upgraded to block more.
""And you do realize the reason that the two custom ROM projects still exist today is because not many people are using them, right?""
What? That sentence doesn't make any sense. Oh wait, are you implying Google would come along and DMCA them or something? Do you even get what is going on? CM is built on top of AOSP. Google has tipped their hat at them, the lead dev now works for Samsung.
There are (edit, at least a) MILLION of installs of CyanogenMod alone. http://stats.cyanogenmod.com/ Those are opt-in only, it's not enabled on any of the CM9 kangs, and that's not counting the dozens of other AOSP ROMs that don't have stat tracking.
According to this article[1] written in last July, CyanogenMod had 4k installs per day. At the same time, Andriod saw 550k activations per day. That's clearly less than 1%.
This is like listing two dissident blog posts on the Chinese internet to argue that the Chinese government does not have total control of the people's life on the internet. You would not see these blog posts gain any real traction inside China because by that time a dozen people will be in jail and the intelligence of the great firewall will be upgraded to block more.