One UI being far inferior to Google's own UI might have been true in the past, but not so much now. One UI has been quite decent from my personal experience for the past several years now. Perhaps it's time to give it another try.
That's the reason why I said "suspect" =). I do not claim to know the exact reason for the selection. In any case, the standard is finalized. If you're concern about this being the problem for the next standard which will likely to affect the use of AES-GCM, I suggest you participate in the current cryptographic contest that would target authenticated encryption: CAESAR (https://competitions.cr.yp.to/caesar-submissions.html). I'm not sure how this will affect the overall usage of authenticated encryption in the industry, but this is currently one of the main topics of interest for cryptographic researchers.
"As someone who has done a number of audits for certified devices, I don't think your statement about shared hardware is accurate. Are you talking about FIPS 140?"
Yes. Is my understanding incorrect? I'd like to be informed if this is the case. Thanks.
I suspect that the extra hardware support is not a major concern. This might be because any company that has a true security concern will eventually need to designated an area on its silicon for cryptographic purposes. This area will be security hardened to protect against any side-channel attacks.
Also, sharing HW resource for cryptographic purposes is not possible for any device that needs to pass certain security certification.
The assessment that SHA-3's performance is bad completely disregard the results from hardware benchmarking (FPGAs and ASICs). All the hardware results have shown conclusively that Keccak is multiple times faster than SHA-2. While I can't say that the algorithm is going to be supported in HW, with enough usage it might be the case.
Edit: Removed my comment regarding BLAKE as it was incorrect.