HTC one V slowness

I bought my first Android phone 10 months back. A brand new HTC one V T420E. Even though it had a single core processor and 512 MB RAM, it had ICS factory installed. At that time, all Android phones were on Gingerbread. At a price of 17K, it was a steal. So I went ahead and bought it. In the beginning, everything was hunky dory. The phone was working perfect and I was swimming in all types of apps from the Google Play Store.
But after a few months, slowness started creeping in my phone. Basic tasks like calling and texting people had become arduous. The dialer kept hanging. I've had instances where I had to wait 10 minutes to make a phone call. I was worried. Being in the IT industry, dealing with IT infrastructure emergencies was part of my job. Not able to reach out to my contacts was a BIG concern.
I liked my phone too much to scrap it. And my lack of Android phone troubleshooting wasn't helping me either. Thus began my journey to find a fix to all my HTC One V phone problems.
Fixing the dialer was on top of the list. Image a phone that makes you wait for 10 minutes to make a phone call. I turned to Google. Found many forums filled with users who were complaining of similar issues. There were also equally helpful number of people offering suggestions.
Some suggested lack of hardware as the reason. I didn't buy in to that because when I began with it, it was fine.
Like a PC user, I thought of killing unnecessary background processes. Installed some task killers. Didn't help. On the contrary, I learnt that Android doesn't need them at all. The way it deals with running processes is way different than Windows.
Then I found posts discussing lack of space on internal memory and the SD card. I could relate to that. So I started probing the Storage options. Moved apps to SD card. Cleared caches of apps that refused to budge from the internal memory. This improved the performance but still not as good as new.
Then I found out the cache option for the Contacts app. I exported all my required contacts on Google contacts. This gave me a reliable backup. Then I removed sync for contacts for Facebook, WhatsApp,etc. Kept only Google contacts synced. (NEXT STEP WILL WIPE ALL YOUR CONTACTS FROM THE PHONE.  MAKE SURE YOU HAVE A BACKUP). Then I removed the cache and app data for Contacts. All my contacts were gone. After a reboot,  I started an OTA sync with Google contacts. Once the contacts were all there, I was all set.
Now, My dialer and SMS apps are super responsive now and my phone hardly hangs. Hoping to continue with this phone for atleast a couple of years :-D