I think we're fighting against the modern world here. My 4S did and still does take the last great iPhone photos, before the processing pipeline ruined it for me, with over-sharpening, smeared noise-reduction and color flattening.

Thankfully we have access to raw DNGs in phones after the 4S, so we can create our own image processing pipeline.

But for "out of the camera" JPGs, the 4S is still supreme.