I am in the exact same position as the opening poster. My hearing is poor in only my right ear, so I picked up one Audeo Smart S iX with an Ambra RIC last week.
The weekend was terrible. My voice sounds hollow, there is some cracking in others speech, and background noises were overriding speech to a large degree in all situations except when there was no other noise except one person talking.
I went back to the Audi yesterday afternoon, and things are better. My Audi is in the same boat as yours with most of her experience being Oticon based. She had the Phonak rep in during the early morning, but the rep was gone by the time I got there. My Audi seemed to know the software screens better, and we made some adjustments that helped a whole lot for me.
The biggest adjustment was changing the device sensitivity to what constituted a noisy environment so that it changed programs to the Voice in Noise program more easily. I am going to give it a few days, but I am expecting to up the sensitivity even more after taking my wife out to a restaurant for her birthday last night. We also made some minor adjustments at the fine settings level to push certain frequencies up or down a couple of Db, and I expect to fine tune that a bit more in the future as well. It will also be a big help once I get the MyPilot remote so that we can set up a couple of different programs with modified settings for some special environments I have to deal with daily like a noisy computer lab with a steady fan noise. We plan to dedicate a special program to that environment to drop most of the fan noise out completely once I find out the frequencies that are causing me problems in there.
The biggest thing I had to learn from my own research and from asking her questions is that there really is a retraining process that needs to happen in the brain with the new aids. Over the last 2 or 3 years my hearing adapted to the loss, and now it needs to adapt to all the extra noise. My good ear can easily ignore the sounds of general noise in a mall or restaurant to pick out a voice, but my bad ear needs to gain that ability back. So part of the problem is going to be giving it the time to do so without tweaking things constantly.
Good luck on your search, and just like you I am researching and learning so that the HA can start enhancing my hearing instead of making it harder to hear as it currently is doing in many situations. Being brand spanking new to this whole world means there is a lot to learn.