Well, i'm officially sticking with Shiv and Kart and the 3 of us are moving out together. Some reshuffling took place, and my decision to not find my own place has now made the 3 of us potential new housemates.

I saw a HDB in Bukit Merah, just to have a gauge of how it would be like. I wasn't impressed. The neighborhood was old, so it was comparatively more run down than the average HDB block, but I wasn't particularly worried about that. I saw the actual place, and I guess it was somewhat dis-used, but what really made my mind up was the locked room. I'm told there's a grey market of HDB flats that have a locked room whereby owners get around paying for a permit from HDB when they want to rent their flat out by claiming they still live in that flat from time to time, therefore they keep one room locked with their belongings in there. I found that particularly disconcerting that I would be living in a house that wasn't mine, that had an empty room that was always locked, of which i had no inkling of what was inside that room - made worse by the fact that i would be living alone.
A single bedroom flat was extremely hard to come by, and i was told by a few agents that technically single bedroom flats can only be rented out by HDB themselves to specific people who qualify, e.g. elderly folk without any family. So my best bet was either a 2 bedroom flat, with 1 locked room, or a studio apartment - of which i decided i could not afford.
So that was it, that summed up my options, so i decided i'd stick with Shiv and Kart.

Shiv has been hard at work the past couple of days looking for suitable apartments. He's facing the exact problems i faced - agents not bothering to call you back, apartments already taken by the time the print ad comes up, or the irritating problem when you call so many numbers that by the time one of them actually calls you back, you have no idea which apartment the number that's calling you back now would be regarding.
But anyway we've made a bit of progress, and we've viewed 2 apartments so far, one in Spottiswoode Park and one in Oxley. The 1st was an upgraded HDB, it was spacious, was on a high floor and in a very convenient location, but my God, the toilets.... the toilets.... were.... horrendous... old, tiles cracking, paint peeling, and dank...; the latter was an old walk-up apartment that was also in a very good location, the apartment itself was old but looked reasonably comfortable, but the problem was that the 3rd room was horrendously small, and that about settled it because none of us were willing to even accept staying in that room.
So we're still waiting for that perfect apartment to come along.
The 2nd apartment was a revelation as well, as i thought from there it was clearly evident the differences in priority between me and Shiv & Kart. Shiv & Kart would rather a livable place in an awesome location, so their expectations of the house was lower than mine, but for me i'd much rather a good apartment in a reasonable location, so my expectations of the house were significantly higher, but i was much more willing to accept longer travel times than the 2 of them.
My justification was that I'd much rather find a place that i want to come home to, and slightly longer travel times weren't an issue to me, as long as we were well connected and didn't have to change 3 or more buses or trains to get to work or home.
Hopefully we'll find a place that's good for all 3 of us, in a location that would satisfy the 2 of them, and a house that's habitable by my comparably lofty standards (gulp).