in my experience being a part of both communities, there isn’t a wearos piracy scene at all. i’ve seen a few shared watchfaces here & there since wearos (well, then android wear) launched, but i can count on my fingers how many times that’s happened. definitely not enough to count as a scene or community imo.

to your first point of getting a watch to replace a phone though, as someone who’s owned multiple wearos watches (both stock & oneui) & tried to use the watch as the primary device multiple times i’d recommend against it atm. even on the best wearos watches (the gw4/5 atm) the experience as a primary device is just, not there yet. while samsung did a lot for wearos, watch apps are still clunky & still omit even the most basic features, some of the worst offenders imo being the stock wearos/google apps (google clock still doesn’t even let you set an alarm name, tone or snooze time).

this all applies of course when there even is a watch app, a lot of android apps either simply don’t make one or ended up abandoning theirs years ago - even apps you’d expect to naturally have one like first party apps (gmail & google calendar were JUST announced after a decade of wearos being alive) or messaging apps. essentially, software-wise on a galaxy watch everything aside from built-in oneui apps & the few best wearos apps will just frustrate you & make you pull out your phone. on a stock wearos watch… lol.

an even bigger issue than software though, is hardware. while i don’t have an lte watch, from what i’ve heard from people that do use their watches without their phones near regularly, watches still run terribly without piggybacking off the phone for everything, & using lte & disconnecting from the phone pretty much instantly causes heat, lag & battery usage to double. i’ve experienced a bit of this myself by turning my phone off & trying to do basic tasks like listening to music, texting & talking to assistant. though i (obviously) didn’t get the heat & battery drain that comes with an lte connection, the whole experience just becomes kinda laggy & choppy when the companion app isn’t connected

this especially makes you feel idiotic when you spend a long ass time finding & fixing a simple bug resulting from a typo then realize that it would’ve been caught immediately if you just wrote tests like you said you would 3 days ago

i don’t think we have anything to worry about, the metaverse is never going to be the next phase of the web. as someone who was enthusiastic about the whole vr boom at first & jumped to buy a quest, the vision zuck is pushing where everyone just has a quest 2/quest pro & uses it as a general computer or for social gatherings is unrealistic.

vr headsets are uncomfortable as hell to wear for more than a few minutes at a time, doing everything in the ui is clunky because you have to deal with vr virtual mice/keyboards, hand tracking is bad at non-gaming tasks & so are the controllers, the people look low poly, low res & uncanny, the screens cause eyestrain & have weird lines/dots, i could go on & on about the numerous reasons why my quest has been in my closet since last year but you get the point.

imo we’re simply not far enough technologically to create a good metaverse experience. and even if we were, well, most people still aren’t going to want to spend most their time in a headset staring that close at a screen