hey bro,
with regards to the launcher, yes you can have a proper apps drawer. I couldn't stand the sight of MI imitating fruit launcher and also felt in a state of disarray without a proper App Drawer. I've pimped up my 1s since with Buzz Launcher and am assuming other launchers should work fine too. I also had same concerns like many that 3rd party launcher may eat into the already limited RAM and slow or kill the 1s altogether but fortunately, that wasn't the case - at least for me. My 1s strangely feels alot snappier after replacing to buzz.
I must agree MIUI sucks (with a capital S) and memory leaks are quite apparent but with tweaking here and there it kind of stabilizes at some point. My RAM status runs anywhere between 130-406 and I do run into the "red zone" memory shortage icon every now and then but it has yet to disable any app half way through. Am rooted, so I've removed quite a bit of Google and System apps that I don't use or have replaced it with better ones from Google Play. On the side of caution, do take note removing systems apps is a very risky procedure you may end up bricking it altogether. So its a self-risk project..
Another area of concern is the "so-called" MIUI security app. I've have partially disabled it cos am rather uncomfortable with it and am running another 3rd party security app which has better ability to control app permissions, ads etc. To sum it all up, 1s has too many settings all over the place not to mention, apps these days have similar settings which clash with system settings at times. 1s needs lots of tweaking as of now from OS to UI to proper RAM management. Until that gets sorted out we'll have to do with what we've got, for now.
Anyhow, here are some screenshots of my 1s with buzz launcher.
