The reform is fast enough for most of my usage and I originally intended for it to replace an x230 with its poor screen as my daily driver.
At first the uncommon keyboard layout made me delay using the reform as a daily driver. (I got used to it later.) Then I hit the battery discharging issue. Due to a mistake on my side this lead to me frying a resistor. The replacement was out of stock, so repairs were delayed and I would only use the reform without batteries inserted.
I also hit by missing wifi drivers in the shipped kernel¹, which made me want to try a different kernel which in turn made me want to enable video output from U-Boot. I got pretty far and learned a lot, but never found the time and motivation to understand how the full display stack works to get actual output working. At this point the reform was delegated to tinkering until mainline kernel support.
¹ Which is/was annoying for an otherwise hacker friendly device. The reform is expensive, so I wanted to use a spare wifi card I had lying around to get things started. Why not build kernel modules and ship them with the image?
I eventually got an ath9k compatible wifi card, a replacement resistor and was also happy about the firmware changes to fight battery drain. I booted the device regularly, checked battery levels and used it a bit which lead me to trust that the battery drain issue was now inconsequential. Then I was away from the device for a few weeks and came back to some dead batteries. 
These cells were possibly pre-damaged from the first time they discharged too much.
So now I’ll reconsider the device after I got new batteries and there’s either over-discharge protection or an external switch to make disconnecting batteries from the system convenient. I saw recent work on U-Boot and I believe 5.17 works now without patches, so it might also be time to look for an NVMe device. 