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?
The question everyone was really asking was if will they will be able to make these quality of life changes before the Reddit API changes come into effect. The answer seems to be “no” unfortunately. It’s a huge missed opportunity that may never come again.