Hello @smartass,
do things which you believe to be correct and necessary in the way you want to do them.
Tip #1: Pick out the devices supported by /e/ OS 9-pie Especially devices with /e/ OS 7-nougart have no future. /e/ have a long list of devices which /e/ want to stop official support.
Tip #2: The North American market is very often supplied by device manufacturers with non /e/ compatible Samrtphones, e. g. Samsung model family S7, S8, S9 with Qualcomm Snapdragon chipset instead of Samsung Exyno chipset. Also the bootloader is often permanently disabled. This means that you must pay close attention to the model name.