No, I haven't installed my own instance. If that's a prerequisite to having a good experience, I don't want it.

I value a federated open standard, but I'm not gonna be the one running it...

The android Element client has been sluggish too, but I believe most of the lagginess comes from the matrix.org instance. Matrix supporters seem to brush this off as "oh well, that's just the matrix.org server that's laggy, it's not a problem intrinsic to the protocol." It's the most important server that's borderline unusable!