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What do you expect from a sensor the size of a lentil. It's always a compromise. Even if you shoot in manual or pro mode there is so much processing going on behind the scenes with upscaling and sharpening. Zoom in and you'll see the mess. I mean smartphone cameras are awesome to quickly get a shot but never look as good as a dedicated camera.
That's why I shoot raw and edit the photos. It needs to be done either way.
And some shots, usually close ones, can be as good as a dslr. It's the long range shots that suck, imo
Yeah raw is another option to fix the images up with proper color correction and white balance. But even with raw you can't circumvent the processing done on the chip. I guess I just don't like the denoising algorithm and the upscaling. It looks muddy and like watercolor closeup, especially when you develop the images in large formats. But I too don't always want to carry my DSLR everywhere with two lenses and a batterypack.
Apps like OpenCamera on Android let you disable (most of) the post processing, and shoot as closely to the raw, physical capabilities of the camera as possible.
You'll never get rid of the watercolor look completely, but you can do a lot to make the photos look fairly decent, I'd say.
Always depends on what you need them for, though. As you say, shots from a phone are less than ideal for large formats that bring out all the little artifacts.
The close ones kinda suck too. There is no really dof and the detail isnt there. That said if your only sharing to social media it can sometimes be hard to tell.