Does anyone recommend Lollipop?

Don't worry, I completely understand being a bit pessimistic about carrier updates.

After doing some digging on how long it took the One M7 to get the Sense 6 update, it seems you may be partially right. The developer edition of the M7 got it about 2 months later. However, the carrier versions quickly followed. TMo, Sprint, and Verizon got it about 2 weeks after the DE. AT&T took about a month after the DE. In any case, HTC met their 90-day deadline by a pretty large margin.

So, if HTC and the carriers follow this same route (no guarantee, of course), we should hopefully see Sense 7 on the carrier models by late May/early June.
I do hope you are right sir! Sense 7 looks like it will be a nice update (if the screenshots that were leaked early in its development were accurate). And I'm hoping it brings a little more white. After using a GPE Rom for a few weeks I grew very fond of the new android color theme, I'd like to see that replicated in New sense.