It wasn't battery life, it was stability. The day Apple brought out the feature toggle for you to choose whether you wanted to throttle your device or not, I turned the throttling off. The phone was as fast as when I got it again.

That same day the phone crashed, a first in a long time, because apparently the power draw was too high for the battery. Imagine if, instead of throttling, they had phones crashing left and right. I think throttling was the right choice, but they could have been more transparent about it.