Yeah, I'm in a similar position. I had a Mi 11 Pro that was a Chinese-only device, but T-Mobile are steadily extending their network to LTE bands 66 & 71. The reception on the phone had never been great, but until recently it was adequate, but now I get dead-spots all over the place after a network change a few months ago. I bought a Mi 11 Ultra Global, but that couldn't be unlocked, so I tried a cheap Mi 12 that was originally a Mexican AT&T device running MIUI 13 and I unlocked that without any problem. I really want a Mi 14 Ultra for the camera, and I can find a genuine global device, but it looks as if even that can't reliably be unlocked now. I'm currently running an unlocked Mi 12 Pro to see if I can live with it, I can unlock this one but have to wait for a month after unlocking the Mi 12, but I'm wondering about just leaving it locked. The original MIUI is actually performing better than xiaomi.eu, and has some things that I prefer (for example, I have access to the sound adjustments which previously I could only get with a Xiaomi headset connected). I've switched from using Nova to the MIUI launcher with gestures, which also means I don't need to use Fling & a hack to get rid of the navigation buttons. The big obstacle for me is adverts. I don't know how people live with them. After running Adaway for years, it's shocking to see just how many ads there are now, many websites I find almost unusable. I think Adaway has a paid VPN option which works without root that I'm just about to investigate, so I may end up buying a Mi 14 and running it on the stock ROM for a few years, by which time it might be possible to unlock the bootloader.