Personally, I have navigated to the LG V series because I am a bit of an audiophile with a high end pair of Sennheisers as my headset so having the built in DAC lets me be an audiophile on the cheap.

But yeah, I never buy the latest phone new. I won't spend $600-1000 on a brand new phone that will be outdated in a year. If a phone comes out that I want, I wait 6-12 months for the price to come way down and then I buy used. Also, I buy my phones from reputable sellers on eBay. I bought my used LG V20 on there 6 months after it came out for $200. Keep in mind this phone was a good $600 when it came out late 2016.

Speaking of used phones and eBay, I am switching to a service called RedMobile which has a partnership with eBay. You can get discounted phone service when you buy a phone off eBay. You can get unlimited talk and text and 1GB of data for under $20 per month through them and they work with all major carriers.