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I have a Kobo Aura One and a Nook Glowlight 3. I used to own a Kindle Voyage.
Nook has the best-looking screen—as in, it looks the most like paper. The colored lighting is a big part of this. It also has physical page-turn buttons. Sideloading shouldn't be an issue in the near-ish future, as they're removing the brain-dead partitioning scheme. (Another option would be the Glowlight Plus, which lacks the colored light and buttons, isn't quite as sharp, but has waterproofing and should be cheaper.)
Kobo has the best customization options and more options for screen sizes. It also has better software all around. Waterproofing is an option you don't get with the Glowlight 3. Though I don't find it to be essential, it's certainly a nice-to-have (I made use of it this evening, in fact). The Aura One has 300DPI and has never gone on sale.
Amazon has ubiquity going for it, and the Oasis 2 is a very nice (expensive) device. It's lacking the colored lighting, though, which these days I consider to be nigh-indispensible. It makes a big difference to me. Calibre will let you convert ePubs to a format the Kindle recognizes, but it's a bit trickier if you want the "enhanced typesetting" (ligatures and hyphenation) features that the Kobo and Nook will both have "for free" with ePub. The cheaper Kindle models are lacking physical page-turn buttons and water-proofing.
For what it's worth, more and more I find myself using my Nook, for which I paid $90, instead of my Kobo, a device I paid $230 for.
As for batteries—they will all degrade over time. There's no getting around that. I've not heard of any studies over which batteries last the longest, but that doesn't mean they don't exist. Someone else may be able to chime in about the feasibility of replacing batteries.
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