You've described my perfect smart watch. I hate the rush for features and better brighter touch screens when all I want is a non intrusive notification device that won't accidentally call my boss fat when my wrist grazes any other part of my skin.
The Pebble was too good and spoiled my opinion of every smart watch I've used since.
For me it would have to be vastly better battery life. I get 3+ days on my TicWatch and consider that to be a bare minimum, it's occasionally inconvenient still.
I really miss the battery life of my Pebble. (Only stopped using it because the notifications and performance were unreliable)
I wear a Garmin Fenix 6X Pro Solar, which is a large watch with pretty incredible battery life. I can run outside (aka GPS) 5x a week and it still lasts 10 days between charges.
I got the Pixel watch 2 as part of the Pixel 8 pro deal, tried selling it unopened for a while but after Christmas I opened it to try it out. I really loved all the smart features above and beyond my Garmin. My Fenix gets notifications and can do simple (preconfigured) replies to msgs, but that's it. So the Pixel watch's "smarts" were cool. but the rest is bleh...
Good:
Display color/brightness
Smarts, integration with Pixel
taking calls (part of above I guess)
Bad:
Size. It's way way too small for me
Battery (see above)
Having to have two apps (Pixel Watch and Fitbit aps is just stupid)
Weirdness with controlling phone notification sounds when the watch is being worn
No easy way to sync steps tracking to Garmin, so basically while I tested this I wore two watches, since I wanted to keep my data going to Garmin
Main thing I want is a better speaker. Making calls is almost impossible and is embarrassing. Better battery life would be second to a better speaker imo