I don't think the fediverse is that complicated. It's like email, you have one provider that can talk to other providers. Everyone "gets" how email works pretty quickly. Now, if someone isn't willing to devote literally a single minute to figuring out how it works; that's not really solvable. If someone asks how to get on the network, I just recommend they register onto whichever instance I'm on, and that's really all they need to know to get started.
EDIT: Yes, the searching really is a pain. It gets worse because a subset of people are actually opposed to indexing or scanning the network, which is going to make integrating everything much harder than it needs to be.