This is a better phone than I was expecting because of all the hate from reviewers. The battery life and ghost touches are the only problem, but it's possible HTC can give us the true potential of the phone with some updates.
Update: 14.08.2018. The OTA update has addressed all the problems and added some other features like the smart zoom in the video mode. I'm not saying its perfect. But battery standby is much better (1.0 percent an hour drain max now without restarting) and there doesn't really seem to be ghost touches or problems with the pressure sensitive buttons anymore. I still think the volume up requires too much pressure still but that could be addressed in Android Pie. There is still a learning curve though coming from normal buttons.
The ghost touches don't happen so frequently, but they are a problem. And for a 700 pound phone they should and are working to address this. Hopefully people will get a fix with the OTA soon. If they can address these problems, this will be a great contender for phone of the year.
For standby battery problems, I found the Hibernator app in the Play store negated and turned the bad into great. So there are work arounds in the mean time.
Update (1.9.2018): The update has addressed the standby time of battery and screen on time and has much improved Edge Sense responsiveness and retention to sensitivity with the double tap. Ironic, I know. I hear there is another update to further address Edge Sense but it is leaps and bounds better with the last update already. It's looking very promising, I didn't think there were much problems really after the last update. But this could further improve it with the hard pressure of the up button still. The only thing that I would want changing but it's not a deal breaker. You grow used to it.