@rolle Unfortunately this is very true. Having tried several, they are not ready for prime time. They are buggy, too loaded up with features that don't all work, and way too busy with things like a riot of color and dancing emojis. When you spend a little time actually trying to use them, you get a real appreciation for the difficulty of clean UI design, and the importance of testing testing testing testing before rolling out capabilities. Mastodon is sort of a bulky dated UI, but it works.
Every little UI decision is critical to a platform's success, and the initial user experience is vital. It could be argued that defaulting to dark mode and 16:9 image clipping is in large part responsible for people bouncing off Mastodon, because it makes the UI look junky. That said, Mastodon works really well, and the more you use it the more you appreciate the functionality decisions.