It has been getting worse for me. In addition to the sporadic outages, the spam, and the slow federation, I've had to develop the habit of refreshing the page before I try to respond to or vote on any comments. If I open the page and let it sit for a few minutes before trying I invariably get an error. It definitely didn't used to be that way.
If it was that bad for you from the outset I'm surprised you stuck around. I wouldn't've. I've only held on because I started to feel "settled".