I'm late, but been wrestling with the PinePhone. I've ultimately decided on Mobian with Phosh + TLP + UFW and probably other stuff. I have decided to take a bit of a short break from most of my projects, but will probably be back to them in a week or so. Just exhausted right now, but something's are starting to look up for once.
Make it more usable without having to do too many mental backflips. I'm going to try to see if I could make a better DE with XFCE + Openbox + dmenu + the sxmo gesture daemon. Have a rough draft in my head.