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So my pain points with this stereo are more or less sorted out now.
1) I figured out a solution for my phone so I can have it visible for turn-by-turn directions, so now I don't need to have the phone speaking the directions at me, so it no longer matters that the stereo mutes the spoken directions.
2) For podcasts, when I get in the car I start my podcast app and rewind the current podcast by 60 seconds and drive away. When the stereo finally connects to the phone, I haven't missed anything in the podcast. It's pretty stupid that I have to do this but it's better than sitting and waiting for the stereo to connect for ~30 seconds before driving away, and I've gotten kinda used to it by now.
So the only thing left is that a lot of people have complained about the audio quality from this stereo. There's no reason why a modern stereo (amplifier) shouldn't have basically perfect audio quality as long as it isn't turned up too loud, so the problem must come down to the settings. I noticed that by default, there are a lot of sound processing settings enabled on this stereo. For example, I believe there's a bass boost that's enabled, and also a "sound restorer" that's supposed to fix up compression artifacts in audio, but I figure features like that almost certainly do more harm than good.
The big offender though is that they seem to have a voice-tracking system to make it sound like voices (vocals) are coming from a different virtual point in space than the rest of the sound. I have NO idea why anybody would ever do this, but if you've ever used a karaoke machine that attempts to remove the vocals from songs algorithmically, you know how crap this can sound. So I think it's super important to set up the system so that the vocals are coming from the same point as the rest of the music. This is displayed by two dots on a grid and you need to move the dots so they're in the same location--I assume this disables the system.
Once all this extra processing stuff is turned off, I think the stereo sounds fine, although I'll admit that I only listened to it for a few minutes with this processing turned on so I can't be sure I'm hearing the same thing you guys are hearing. But, food for thought if you're using this stereo and you're unhappy with the sound quality.
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