Your purchasing experience sounds sadly familiar to a lot of other drivers in CA if you read through some of the posts on this site. The negative experience behind you, I think you will love the car more and more as you drive it. (I know I do.)

Once you read through some posts and familiarize yourself with the car, you will learn how to get it to run in electric only mode. I thought that this would bother me, but it doesn't. In fact, it has very little impact on fuel economy (the Prius and the HCH are neck and neck in FE if you check out the Green Hybrid DB). Plus, think of all the great things about the car, including all the safety features which come standard.