Does federation have a bit of a learning curve? No doubt.
Is Lemmy buggy as heck? Absolutely.
But I don’t think that really justifies a lot of the comments I’m seeing in Reddit alternatives threads that it’s hard to figure out. The front page feed and sort options are very similar to Reddit. Searching for same-instance communities is not too difficult. Posting, commenting, and voting are all quite intuitive. What’s the problem?
Oh I have all the faith in the world that someone will come up with a solution eventually. I just assume it was never a major priority because of the userbase. With an explosion of users I’m sure they have a 100 things they want to improve and it is just a matter of time.