A headphone male connector is already a non-flexible thing that sticks out. I don't see how the lightning adaptor is any different in that regard. It's a bit of non-flexible stuff that sticks out, attached to a flexible cable. The biggest difference is the cable then has another short non-flexible bit in it, but nobody complained about having short non-flexible portions of cable when headphones started including volume controls on the cable (it's just on a different part of the cable).

> I do care about music quality

It seems that AirPods aren't bluetooth but are instead something else. I'd expect the audio quality to be better than bluetooth. But I guess we have to wait until people have actually tried them out to determine how good it is.

> Then I guess I will have to learn how to use my phone again by switching to Android.

I do not believe for a second that you're going to actually change platforms simply to have an audio jack without a dongle. I bet in 1–3 years you're going to realize that there's a plethora of lightning headphones to choose from, along with an adaptor that lets you use headphones and charge simultaneously, and you'll stop thinking about this change as a problem.