I've been a Kindle user for over 15 years, but I finally stopped buying Kindle books after Amazon removed the "Download & Transfer via USB" option, effectively eliminating the ability to remove DRM.
You can still remove DRM with Calibre and the PC Kindle app (not sure if it works for the latest versions of the Kindle app, but the older versions can still download books fine anyway).
That said, I've switched to Kobo a long time ago. It's easy to de-DRM, and under the encryption there's a bog standard EPUB with some minor Kobo-specific extensions - and no additional image compression, which is important for comics and manga. I have a Kobo reader too, but these EPUBs work everywhere and don't suffer from any AZW->whatever conversion issues.
It's a shame. I kept my original Kindle (1st gen) around for a long time just so that I could go to "Manage my Content" and then Download the Book via USB for that older device to get an AZW3 file rather than the really locked down KFX format because DeDRM'ing it was easier.
