>I had a young (pre-teen) boy who filed copyright claims on several of my tutorials, and they where taken down instantly and took months to resolve via email.

I have a feeling no (big) video hosting site will be immune to this. This is a legal problem not a technology problem.

>Beyond that, YouTube is taking a ~50% cut of your ad revenue AND any donation revenue on the site which seems pretty extreme.

Yeah, I'm not sure what a 'fair' split is, but hosting and serving video is heavier than apps, and app-store collect 30% of revenue. With more competition that ratio may change in favor of content creators.

>They also don't do good when it comes to new content discovery, as the YT search promotes mostly popular content

Again, I think this is less YouTube and more the nature of the beast. You're in a typical long-tail market - where you compete with millions of other creators, with low barriers to entry. No search or discovery is going to get it right.