Hmm, I'd return it then, if they have got that much worse. A friend got a recent Panasonic 32" budget set and that seemed very responsive and quick to start up.
I think for all his faults, Xi does genuinely hate poverty and desire to lift people out of if. Maybe it's for selfish reasons like cementing his place in Chinese history, I have no way of knowing, but he is succeeding at it. His methods can be extreme of course, amounting to genocide in some cases, but the fascists got the trains running on time...
But if you are using it as a dumb TV then why do you need the interface? All you need is to change channels and inputs, and maybe the volume (I use my Nvidia Shield remote for that via CEC). I barely ever touch my TV's remove.
As for the lag, it depends on the model. The older and cheaper ones are bad, the newer ones are fine. I had one a few years ago (returned due to developing a fault with the screen after a couple of years) that was inexpensive and didn't think the lag was bad.
I'm a little surprised nobody has made a fridge with a motorized door yet. It seems so obvious, and those guys spend their working lives thinking about how to make fridges better.
Memory fault -- brain fried