It's certainly a tsunami of priorities. The UX/UI generally has more visibility to common users than backend stuff–not that backend stuff has any less priority, just that kbin and Fediverse in general have a great deal of visibility at the moment, and there's already a learning curve to kbin/Fediverse. Having a familiar and intuitive UX/UI will go a long way to keeping users engaged long enough to convert to full-time kbin/Fediverse users.
Honestly, all of this needs a really great infographic. It took me about a day of tinkering to grasp how all this works–and there's still more to learn. Too many users will come to Fediverse and not recognize that info can be seen across instances, and that's the beauty in its design.
The best analogy I've seen so far is that each instance is like a webmail provider. Each provider can send messages to other providers, only now instead of email, it's entire magazines (a subreddit equivalent).