one distinction to draw here is the difference between Steemit (a website / steemit.com) and Steem the blockchain. "Steemit" (the website) sucks. That doesn't necessarily mean that Steem the blockchain sucks. There are many alternative website front ends built on the Steem blockchain, and literally almost every single one is better than steemit.com. Steempeak.com is my personal favorite, but there are tons of choices.

There is absolutely no reason that a website built on Steem blockchain has to be complicated. All the fiddly bits can be hidden "under the hood" as it were, invisible to a user, if the front end so chooses. A front end could, for instance, automatically (and invisibly to the user) delay all votes cast before 15 minutes on a post until after 15 minutes, thereby totally sidestepping the reverse auction time window - and a user of that front end would never even have to know about reverse auction or think about if they should vote a post or not.

The truth is that steemit, inc (another confusing factor of course is that Steemit could refer to a company, Steemit, Inc - hereafter referred to as Stinc for convenience and also because it is appropriate LOL) has deliberately chosen not to work on the steemit.com website, instead focusing on improvements to the blockchain behind the scenes. I personally think this was the right call. If the website worked well and tons of new users had on boarded and stayed active during the peak, we would actually be in a world of hurt right now because the blockchain itself wasn't ready for more users. The amount of transactional data that has to be stored in the consensus layer of the witness servers is really high given the use case as a social media site where tons of small micro transactions like upvotes and comments are happening all the time. Until the development work to implement RocksDB solution is finished and more of these social interactions can go to non-consensus layers of the blockchain, the Steem blockchain is literally not ready for more users. So given that, it wouldn't make any sense at all for Stinc to focus on making the website itself work better. It would be like if a bus had an engine that couldn't make it two miles without bursting into flame - the bus company would obviously prioritize fixing the engine rather than making the interior of the bus more comfy and getting more passengers.