My N7 has gotten really sluggish....suggestions to fix or is it time to replace?

[UncleLes]

My N7 2012 has run mostly well for daily use since I got it in August of 2012, but lately it's gotten really sluggish, the battery life is going down, and in general it seems to be hiccuping more often. I rolled it back to 4.4.4 KitKat when L came out as it was really awful under 5.0 and it was much better under KitKat. I get daily reminders to update to to 5.0.2 but haven't done so.

So, are there things I can or should do to possibly help it (I clear the system cache regularly, but have never done a factory reset), or is it time to look for a replacement?

If the latter, I see the N9 is on sale at HTC. Any thoughts on that or other recommendations?

 

[B. Diddy]

I would have thought that flashing the previous firmware would have acted like a factory reset, but as a last resort, it might be worth it. Is it slow in Safe Mode as well?

 

[David Rosen]

My dad gave me his Nexus 7 2012 because he never used it anymore. It ran great. I factory reset it. Allowed it to update to Android 5. It ran like pure horrible garbage. People told me to flash back to 4.4.4. I just finally did after a couple months of putting it off... It still runs like garbage, just not as bad garbage. Why is that? It's totally fresh. There's now way it ran like this out of the box... Do the components actually degrade over time? It just doesn't make sense to me...

 

[UncleLes]

I would have thought that flashing the previous firmware would have acted like a factory reset, but as a last resort, it might be worth it. Is it slow in Safe Mode as well?

Good point about the rollback acting like a reset; it did wipe everything. But I think it has gotten progressively more finicky since I did that. I did leave the bootloader unlocked (but not rooted) when I got done so I wouldn't have to erase everything again unless I wanted to.
As for Safe Mode, I don't know as I have never started it in Safe Mode.