I wonder if a "woot" style service could work. If 10K like-minded consumers made a group-buy every 2-3 years, a high-end panel vendor might be willing to provision a new SKU with a few firmware tweaks.

For a while, Costco had a reputation as the place where you could buy a TV and be confident that it was usable as a "dumb" TV. The rumor (unconfirmed as far as I know) was that, among the customizations that manufacturers would make for retailer-specific models, the Costco ones included firmware tweaks to pull back on requirements for things like mandatory connectivity, account creation and the like.

I'm not sure how true any of that is, but in any case Costco still has a reputation as a place where it's easy to return a TV, and they pay attention to the stated reason for return.

I would go in on a group-buy dumb TV, but not every 2-3 years.