Amazon Echo Show 8 Smart Display w/ Built-In Alexa (1st Gen) Expired

I don't know too much about the amazon echo show / other devices, but have been reading a bit about it lately learning what the options are.

One thing I learned is that you can reportedly use any reasonable Fire tablet (e.g. HD 8, HD 10) (or a windows PC) as an echo show by using a menu option called "show mode" which you can turn on or off. And I've heard a couple people claim to be getting the tablets basically to use in that mode.

For this price on an 8 inch unit I guess there isn't a huge price difference between the tablet on sale and the echo show itself, though you can always use the tablet as a real tablet, and you can't (AFAIK) do that with the echo show.

For the 10 inch size though given the much higher prices of the echo show in the 10 inch size I had to ask myself why I would want to buy an echo show 10" vs. just getting the HD 10 tablet on sale and buying a stand for it and using it as a show when / where I wanted to do that, it'd probably be less expensive, more versatile, and maybe better in various ways, maybe not, I haven't reviewed / tried it.

The other things I've learned is that from a read it group / reviews that there seems to be a LOT of dissatisfied customers about the "echo" (also) and the "echo show" in particular --

* people say the echo show has become like an advertising billboard that you can't "shut up" / turn off the incessant stream of things you don't want to see, don't care about, and don't want wasting your time / screen space / attention.

* similarly for the the audio interface of alexa on the echo device(s) same deal, many people getting more and more irrelevant content spewed at them that nothing they do can get it to turn off / shut up. Advertisements veiled as "tips", "suggestions", "by the way..." etc. over and over same stuff and varied stuff that they can't turn off despite trying all the commended options that "should" work etc.

* people that were fans of echo / alexa getting fed up with that kind of stuff as well as bad voice recognition and bad usability in various scenarios and talking about jumping over to use the nest or apple or whatever other "smart device / home" option since echo / alexa seems to get worse over time or not much better, more annoying, and the others seemingly are less bad.

So IDK I get the idea of the utility concept of this but in practice it seems dubious that it is very enjoyable / safe / user oriented / user controlled etc. Makes me think more than twice about investing anything into this ecosystem other than for experimentation / comparison / review.