I switched away from it only recently. There is nothing else that is as customizable, intuitive, and polished. My app drawer was organized with different pages. I used most of the built in gestures. When using an icon pack, it automatically rethemed the missing icons to a color scheme that matched. I use octopi now and I have had to download other apps to get a closer experience to what I was used to.
I've tried most of the other suggested launchers but they feel clunky or take longer to find what I need. It also takes a long time to tinker with a new launcher. I think it's taken a few weeks for me to find something that works well enough and I still hope that Nova gets an open source fork.
Not specifically. I just discovered Blip from a post and it's been great. I was curious about what people find are useful that are not well known.
A week or so ago, I did see that some people were raising some concern over downloading from f-droid and to use obtanium to directly install apps from GitHub instead.