Yes, the feature situation sucks. If you look at the pull requests on Github you see that the transition from pseudo-startup to community project kept a lot of things in the pipeline. For example, someone implemented a working xmpp chat 2 years ago, and it did not get merged, for pretty much no reason at all.

I hope that diaspora will develop faster, now that it is a completely community run project and has some momentum again.

About your specific problem: You can host your own diaspora pod if you are really paranoid, for free, on Heroku for example. But I agree that this is one of the basic features that should be implemented as soon as possible.