As you point out, the UX is not all that polished yet, but it seems to be making reasonable progress. The protocol is convoluted, but what it's doing is also a

As you point out, the UX is not all that polished yet, but it seems to be making reasonable progress. The protocol is convoluted, but what it's doing is also a lot more complex than IRC. For me it's more comparable to IRC than discord in the sense that discord is completely centralized and exhibits all the problems we see from other centralized social media. I've been running a private homeserver for communication with some friends (for when we'd rather not have the data stored with discord) and while I do agree with most of your points, even my non-technical friends managed to get in relatively easily. It wasn't as simple as with discord, but certainly not too far from what people are used to these days. A simpler protocol with better decentralization and polished client can probably be done but it's obviously a lot of work. My biggest concern with Matrix is the conflicting incentive created by having the company that does most of the development also be the one providing the most popular homeserver. They're effectively incentivized to centralize the network even more.