[highhedgehog]

I might be missing something here, but what do you mean by this?

"One defect that has bothered me about BW is that to unlock the vault, locally, you have to be able to contact the BW server."

If my device is offline I can still unlock the vault and access my passwords.

[jiveturkey]

huh. and if your device is online, it syncs via BW cloud?

I don't remember 100% but I thought a long time ago I had a local-only kind of BW setup. At some point I had to (or was dark pattern encouraged to) create a BW account on their cloud. Ever since then, my local vault has my email address associated with it.

Right now, if I open the app fresh, I get the "login page". There don't seem to be any other pages/dialogs that one can open at this point. "Log in or create a new account".

The field to login is an email address. The choices are to log in on bitwarden.com, bitwarden.eu, or self-hosted. There is no option to unlock local vault without contacting one of the 3 server options. I use bitwarden.com. If the server can't be reached, the vault does not unlock.

There's another option to "Create account". That requires an email and password setup. There's no server selection on that pane.

There's no option to not use an "account" and just unlock the local vault. There's no option to create a vault, apart from creating an "account".