People's experience with Samsung phones are subjective. When I got my Galaxy S4, 2 years ago (coming from an iPhone 4S), I had a wealth of problems with the phone in my initial few months. The first annoyance I had was to do with syncing my old messages. I transferred over all my text messages and once they were moved over, the phone would crash any time I tried to open the messaging app, it turned out it didn't like too many texts sitting in the inbox. I resolved this by downloading a different messaging app from the store and setting it as my default, although it was less than ideal.
The second issue I had was a pretty major one that plagued me for a while. Whenever I made a phone call, I could never hear through the ear piece. It turned out this was an inherent fault with various Android phones(!) and the workaround was to download an app called SoundAbout. I did so, and it worked temporarily, but the only way I could make calls 50% of the time was with my headphones. I took the phone back to the store for a replacement, which they thankfully swapped the first time, but it happened only a month later on the replacement handset, so it had to be sent off for a repair. It was at this point I very nearly gave up on the phone altogether. I promised myself that if I have to replace it again, then I'm looking for a different phone. Thankfully I never went through the same issue after that.
Needless to say, I persisted, but purely because the phone had the features I wanted at the time (OTG for gaming, a decent camera, removable storage and battery) and I wanted to use it for my trip to Japan. 2 years later I'm still using the phone, but I still find issues here and there. More recently, the phone has been getting exceedingly HOT and draining battery at 1% per minute, just from simple tasks like opening a web page. I have tried killing all the processes and closing all background apps from running, yet it still does it at random, it's particularly frustrating. My girlfriend's S3 mini went through these same painful issues during it's last few months, remaining very slow (I cleared the cache, etc which helped temporarily) and a battery that would die out in less than a day. She now has a 640 and she's REALLY happy I suggested it, despite the lack of Snapchat ?_?
I guess the point I'm trying to make is, although the Samsung (Or Android in general?) has a good level of hardware versatility, a good app selection and more customisation to the front end, it comes with a sacrifice in efficiency and battery life. So, I can actually understand the pains the OP may have felt with the note, I just happened to be more persistent than they may have been, purely because the phone was desperately what I wanted at the time. Whilst I'm likely going to miss some of the available apps, the nice screen and the available accessories of the Samsung (my Zero Lemon 7500mah battery is a god send), I won't miss the inconsistencies, as I will be opting for the 950 when it becomes available. If my girlfriends 640 is anything to go by after having some time with it, I'm in for a treat.