Stuck with a pig as Cinderella enters the ball

Question

NOW the Charge comes out. Two weeks too late for me to trade up to it. Verizon kept pushing it back, and I kept hoping it would come out in time for me to unload this battery addicted hog of a Thunderbolt and trade up.
Don't get me wrong, the Thunderbolt is a good device - great in some areas. But, the Charge will do everything is does, with a much nicer (and far less power hungry) screen, and will last much longer doing it.
Oh well, at least I'm only stuck in a one year contract. With the direction Verizon is heading (14 day evaluation period down from 30, no 1 year contracts, no 1 year upgrade price, tiered data coming) I'm not sure I'll be on them anymore once this contract ends. Putting out this joke of a phone, then acting like it's perfectly acceptable, is the final straw.
I wrote to Verizon about the battery life (under 4 hours if you actually use it). I wanted to try a new battery - send mine in, get a new one to try (though I'm very sure the actual battery isn't the issue other than it's anemic size) the reply was that "smartphones use a lot of juice", and maybe it's an app I'm using that's causing the drain. (Not unless it's an app that Verizon put on it and I can't uninstall , because the battery was this bad right out of the box before I put any apps on it.
At least this rep didn't try to sell me the extended battery, and inform me that the original battery has 1400 minutes of talk time, while the extended has 2750 minutes of talk time. Seriously? A smartphone rep who thinks mAH stands for minutes of talk time? I know more about these phones than the average rep, and I'm a dunce. He also stated that I should shut off 4G, turn off backround updates, go into settings and force close the Blockbuster DRM. So, turn your 4G smartphone that you paid for  into a 3G average phone - that's the answer. Eliminate functionality in trade for battery savings. Brilliant - glad I paid all that money for the phone itself!
It's shameful to sell people a product, then try to sell them an accessory to make it useable. I have to have a charger in my car and at work just to get through the day. I can literally surf the internet for 20 minutes off a full charge, and be below 80% when done. Put it down for an hour, come back and be below 70%. Pathetic.

Answer 1

As far as battery life, the first thing I did when getting the phone was to fully charge the battery BEFORE ever turning it on (as the manual says to do). I'm a stickler for following directions!.  I did this.
Overall, to conserve battery, I've done the following:
1. Set screen timeout to 30 secs - I'm set higher, but I kill the screen whenever I put it down.
2. Set a non-animated wallpaper - I already do this.
3. Turned off all display animations - I already do this.
4. Left screen brightness on auto - Me too.
5. Turned off GPS, Bluetooth, and Wi-Fi (only turn on GPS/Wi-Fi as needed and turn off when done, don't use Bluetooth) - Tried this, made no discernable difference.
6. Disabled unneeded syncing of various applications (ex. Stocks, News, set Gmail to only sync mail) - I don't even sync Gmail
7. In browser settings, changed "Enable plugins" (ex. Flash) to "On Demand" - I haven't done this.
8. For location settings, only Google Location Services are enabled (turn on others only as needed and turn off when done) - I've tried all combinations, including no location services on.
A few final notes, I don't use any of the social networking features, so less syncing is needed, although I'm sure there are settings to tweak in those apps should one use them. I don't use any app/task killer as I believe they're counter productive as apps/processes will just continually try to restart using up battery power. And finally, my Thunderbolt is all stock (not rooted) and the 4G LTE radio is always enabled. - I don't use any social apps, on the phone or at all anywhere.
Regardless, these things you and I have disabled are selling points of the device, and they shouldn't need to be shut off to make it useable. Like I said, my Omnia II, which was much less powerfull than the T-Bolt, had a stock battery that was higher capacity, 1500MAh versus 1400 in the Thunderbolt. And it was only decent on battery life. There is no way HTC could have believed this was enough to power this beast.