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?
Then as a user you would be free to click to filter out comments from lemmy, and the top mod of /politics could choose to “defederate” from lemmy for that forum, and users at lemmie would be free to create /politics_tankies or whatever.