I think @user990 is probably right that the Oticon aids with their open paradigm is probably the wrong choice for you, because it seems like you don’t want to make the brain hearing work to sort out what you want to hear and focus on it, but you simply want the hearing aids to “spoon fed” the speech to you instead of developing your brain hearing.
Oticon makes all sounds around you available, balance them up a bit to favor speech (how much in favor of speech depends on your personal settings in Genie 2), but you must be willing to work and develop your brain hearing to sort out all the sounds presented to you and learn to focus on what you want to hear (usually speech) and ignore the rest. That’s how normal hearing people listen anyway, because they can hear everything and they have no choice but to sort things out.
An analogy is to make all things on a photo sharp and clear for you so you can see whatever you want to see better, but you must do the work to scan through everything and pick and choose to focus on what you want to see. People who like the open paradigm tend to care about being able to hear more than just speech. They want to have a better sense of awareness of everything around them, and be able to hear all those things. They just don’t want those things to overpower speech. And Oticon delivers them all that.
The traditional paradigm is different. It aggressively blocks out everything behind and on your sides to let you focus on the sounds in front of you better. It’s like putting blinders on a horse so it can only see up front. Now if you want to hear the person on your left, you must turn your head toward the left before you can hear that person. People who like this approach usually don’t care about hearing anything else but speech in a noisy environment. To them everything non-speech is noise and is not important to them. They would rather have more comfort and less listening effort at the expense of not having full awareness of the surrounding.
But sometimes it’s not a matter of choice. Like @1Bluejay shared with you, she tried in earnest with Oticon aids and simply couldn’t get them to work for her. But the Phonak aids work out better for her. So sometimes it’s a matter of limitation in your hearing loss and not just a matter of choice. Her hearing loss, however, is much much worse than yours. My hearing loss is also worse than yours, although not as bad as @1Bluejay . But I’m doing OK with Oticon aids, simply because I’m the type who prefers to be very aware of my surrounding, even in noisy surroundings.
Because of this, I’m guessing that you seem like the later type of people, based on you post. it doesn’t seem like you want to have to sort out the sounds to focus on what you want to hear, you just want to hear speech and don’t care about anything else.
You asked if a different brand of HAs make a difference? I would say Phonak aids will probably work better than Oticon aids for you. Furthermore, Phonak seems to have come up with a new solution to solve this “blinder” issue with their Speech Sensor technology, which will detect where speech comes from and automatically adjust the width of the beam forming accordingly (see screenshot below).
The advantage of this is that you don’t have to turn your head to hear the speech coming from behind you. But the disadvantage is that now you don’t have a narrow enough beam forming to help you if you have multiple speech cues coming from all directions (the middle scenario). For the scenario on the right below, the beam forming is adjusted to be a bit wider than the scenario on the left, so now you will have to turn your head a bit to the right to hear the person speaking on your right, and your beam forming field becomes a bit wider, thus you’ll have to put up with more noise compared to the scenario on the left.
