I think I'm just giving up on getting a really good monitor and sticking with a normal IPS panel.
I've been on a 1440p IPS 144hz display for years now, it has nearly 18,000 power on hours and it's honestly pretty good all around. Only major issues really are that I wish the refresh rate was higher, and I'd like actual HDR.
Every time I've tried to upgrade though, there's always just....issues?
A while ago I tried an IPS miniLED from koorui that has some good reviews, and was massively underwhelmed. HDR just didn't look that good on it, maybe it was a unit thing or a calibration thing, who knows.
More recently I tried a 42 inch LG C5 that I got for a deal from bestbuy, and it was much better, but still just....kinda ok? I made sure to go through and fix up all my HDR settings, calibrate everything correctly, make sure my blurays and games were playing correctly, and yeah HDR does look better, but really not that much better. And of course this panel has a bunch of downsides too with how annoying HDR is to manage in Windows, SDR brightness being a pretty large downgrade over my old IPS panel, burn in being a real concern given my last panel has lasted 18,000 hours, etc.
I was looking at a couple more things to try today, namely one of the tandem OLED panels like the MO27Q28G, or the MSI 300hz VA miniLED, but then I'm just reading about the downsides and I just think I no longer care about getting a significantly better display. Everything has too many downsides that would bother me more than my black levels not being as dark as they could be.
So I saw a 300hz MSI IPS panel at costco canada for $200 bucks, I'm gonna pick that up tomorrow and just wait until the problems with better panels go away. My IPS panel has been serving me well for years and will continue to be my secondary display when this new one comes in.