Cox _just_ sent out a similarly-phrased email (Subject: Enjoy this gift of faster internet, <me>) saying they bumped my upload speed from 35->100mbps. I didn't expect that given the new minimum upload speed is 20mbps
From the end-user perspective: I see Yuzu and Ryujinx differences as mostly about game compatibility (I keep both around). I personally don't know any feature one has over the other that might drive people to a specific one.
As far as the requirement to own a Switch, it mostly has to do with being able to decrypt games to play them and system OS apps for services they provide to games. If they were to ship these keys or firmware blobs, they'd be at risk of litigation from Nintendo versus providing documentation on how to obtain the keys and firmware legally. Some of the firmware files might be able to be reimplemented in the future depending on patents and the like.
As a side note, the files required to play _can_ be found online, probably by searching the firmware version plus the filename from Yuzu/Ryujinx docs. (The keys are firmware version specific, and I think tools like RyuSAK let you get both keys and firmware, but this definitely isn't the legal way to go about it )
And you're saying Google's isn't the same? Mozilla and Google are both businesses whose primary goals are obtaining money.
If you think that there are engineers specifically on the Chrome/Chromium team who ARE interested in the technology, what's the chances that there are engineers on the Firefox team who feel the same?
My point being companies will always have to be monetarily-biased, and the hope is that the team working on the product itself still believe in it because they don't get much kickback from management's decisions about the technology.
I used to be a hobbyist dev of a ROM back from Android L-O, and left to start a professional software engineering career. I recently re-joined the hobby with the release of Android 12, and Calyx OS was new to me, so I ended up taking a look at their code repos.
Tl;Dr: If you want a privacy-focused no-compromises fork of Lineage OS, and the default hardening Google performs on their platform is enough for your personal threshold of safety (this is where most custom ROMs settle), Calyx is probably a good choice. If you're concerned about novel security vulnerabilities (read: more paranoid/vulnerable than most) affecting your device, choose Graphene.
Privacy-wise, Calyx is basically Lineage with most of it's headline features being provided via LOS or third-party apps available on F-Droid. It does a good job at de-Googling your experience and has good privacy-focused default settings and apps. I like the custom location provider. Their egress firewall feature is a nifty improvement on top of LOS's original implementation of a similar feature.
Security- and hardening-wise, it's not much better than Lineage, which isn't much better than AOSP. Zero to little runtime or kernel hardening to be found. Graphene, on the other hand, puts the effort into hardening as many aspects of Android and the kernel as possible. Graphene has a custom hardened `malloc` for helping prevent memory safety exploits, a hardened libc, toolchain, and app runtime, among all sorts of other difficult but valuable security changes. Functionality-wise: almost anything Calyx can do, Graphene can do with some F-Droid apps to help.
This might seem a bit harsh, but the reality is that Graphene has some a large number of deep security changes upon AOSP that Calyx isn't yet up to par with. As we've all seen, security in 2021 is difficult, and it takes decades or a lot of specialized experience to be a security expert. It's difficult enough for large companies to hire and retain security talent, and for hobbyist projects/small organizations even more so.
Does everyone need a hardened runtime? Probably not. Are there people who do and/or want one? Definitely
Edit: one concern of mine about Calyx is their bundled VPN serviced by Sprint (as per https://calyxinstitute.org/legal/terms-of-service). Third-party VPNs are always to be taken with a grain of salt for privacy depending on your activities online and the VPN's owners themselves. I suppose it's better to have a VPN than not, but you must also trust that party and their security with your highly valuable network traffic, which should be a very high bar. Obviously, nothing limits you from loading up OpenVPN, IPSec, Wireguard, etc and going your own route.