Secondly, it feels like in a federate network of any type that growing the network should be top priority, even over the user experience.
Put another way, it seems to me as a newbie that Mastodon's growth effort itself has been federated, which is probably not ideal for the growth necessary to really challenge the walled gardens.
The service itself is improving slowly and quite conservatively which is a really nice change of pace from the warp speed enshittification I have been used to for years now. On the other hand, there is also a wide range of high-quality third apps for it which Twitter now completely lacks (and basically every other walled garden platform, e.g. Reddit was the latest casualty) of you need a different experience.