I root for LG every year and owned and loved the G2, G3, and G4. I thought the G4 was close to perfect (battery life was so so).
I was really pulling for LG with the G5. They could have learnt a thing or two from HTC. Okay that sounds crazy, but I am referring to the HTC One M7. It was a quality phone (the camera, not so much). No bells and whistles. Good build quality. Excellent overall phone. No stutter issues. Smooth UI. If LG had stuck to the basics, updated the build quality, improved their already excellent camera, increase the battery size, included none of the LG and friends, or the modular stuff or gimmicks, and toned down the UI, then they would have been fine. Give Samsung and Apple credit. Their upgrades are usually clearly upgrades (the S6 an exception maybe). Folks are looking for the basics. Is the battery life better? Build quality and appearance? Display? Some changes in the G5 will bother folks (getting rid of the app drawer would bug me, but the next release of Android may go in that direction, and the S7 has that feature as an option) but, again I credit them for trying something new.
What also troubles me is the decrease in battery size. The G4 in my hands wasn't too bad. But if you use your phone, moderately, the battery drained pretty quickly. Same with the G3. So I find it troubling that the G5 has a smaller capacity battery. Add the always on display that "only drains 0.3-0.8% per hour" (LG's estimates) and that is pretty significant drain. On the low end that is 7.2% drain per day. On the high end that is almost 1/5 of the battery's charge.
Another area where LG fell short and where Samsung succeeded: release the phone very shortly after the announcement. LG loses out here. Again.
But, maybe LG had their reasons for doing what they did.