You are completely right. The developers are aware of the problem (you see it still says Beta in the upper left corner) and are working hard to solve the daunting task of making the user experience more fulfilling and empowering.

If you "follow" someone, for example, the tab that says "feed" will show a list of blog posts of those who you follow.

There are off-site tools like steemstats.com that help keeping an overview.

Other interfaces to the blockchain are being developed concurrently.

Some said this integration crash course helped them. It is already a bit outdated, but if you can see past the spicy language, you'll see where this is going.