Ello could be smoking hot with the right management team. It's got the pieces/UI but missing the marketing/polish/UX chops.
Actually, for the life of me, I struggle anytime I login to Ello and have to hunt for how to logout. The half page banner (some translucent stuff to scroll through) of whatever on top doesn't make things easier to know about either. The whole UI is completely unintuitive, quite bland and too minimalistic to figure things out. So I stopped checking it several months ago. The privacy part is very nice and very welcome, because of which I had a lot of hope on the platform. But Ello was (or probably still is) nowhere close to Facebook or Google+ in terms of UI and usability. Try pushing a novice user from either of the big platforms into Ello and watch the person struggle. One's social graph being in some other walled garden is just one piece of the problem in trying to move users to something else. But that something else needs to be an intuitive and viable alternative in the first place.
P.S.: I'm not a tech newbie.
P.P.S.: I try to push people I know to better (if not the best) platforms and services when it comes to privacy.
"I'm not a tech newbie." <-- I suspect that is why the UI is difficult for you (and me too). Ello's UI seems to purposely break convention and therefore predictability for anyone used to convention, in the spirit of an artistic and minimal design. I'd liken it to how millennials enjoy the "playful discovery" of Snapchat's UI and anyone over the age of 25 finds it confusing and frustrating.
I agree it's a confusing UI (probably only at first, as with anything) but I also appreciate that they are trying some new ui patterns and doing something different as far as design. That's kind of their point, they're not Facebook or Google+, they're something different, and they have the freedom to experiment and be different.
I do tend to agree that the interface is a tad _too_ minimal. Tooltips have recently been added.
Arguably, Ello misuses the hamburger as well.
Behind the scenes though, the styling's very clean. Icons are all SVG and could be resized (or re-coloured) with a CSS tweak. CSS and HTML are both quite clean, and restyling the site (I do it for my own use) is trivial.
Some small-sample usability testing likely would be a really good idea.
Holding up G+ as a paragon of UI design jars with me. There is _so_ much wrong with that site. And its guts are a goddamned disaster (Closure's CSS minification hashing is a crime against humanity).