ignoring anything else, that process seemed pretty smooth to me, esp for government. Sure you hit a few snags, but the main one (a lost email) could've happened signing up anywhere.
The second problem was a lot of jargon that was in my opinion unnecessary and was internal US government leaking to the end users and you had to learn it to understand the documentation about what to do. Figuring out what SNAP-R stood for took me way to long and it's nothing more than a website registration (from my point of view).