Honestly mad respect to these Devs man. Gotta realise they're doing this stuff for free and they're not getting paid. If anyone hasn't checked out the Asahi Linux blog, do give it a read, it has done fascinating deep dives into Apple's hardware engineering.
Most people can't tell the difference between low bitrate vs high bitrate. Usually just confirmation bias.
Have you truly tested whether you can? I don't mean playing each side by side and seeing whether you can tell the difference, but actually testing yourself in a way that you don't know which is being played (like having someone else play it for you).
You can block ads on the NVIDIA shield launcher using Pihole of adguard DNS. Just need to go into settings for your wifi network on your shield, change dns1 and dns2, then reset the home app. It won't be able to download new ads, so the banner on the home page will stay the default ad for several of Google's own apps like play store and YouTube or whatever.
I too was not able to find a third party launcher that looked as nice as the original.
There's a project called Tabby that your can host as a server on a machine that has a GPU, and has a VSCode extension that connects to the server.
The default model is called starcoder, and it's the small version, 1B parameters. The downside is that it's not super smart (but still an improvement over built in tools), but since it's such a small model, I'm getting sub-second processing times.
Honestly mad respect to these Devs man. Gotta realise they're doing this stuff for free and they're not getting paid. If anyone hasn't checked out the Asahi Linux blog, do give it a read, it has done fascinating deep dives into Apple's hardware engineering.