I have a love/hate relationship with it as well; I cannot find anything better from a usage perspective; the rest is either or all of; slow, lacking in features

I have a love/hate relationship with it as well; I cannot find anything better from a usage perspective; the rest is either or all of; slow, lacking in features, stability on sketchy/slow internet (try driving around while talking on, for instance, Slack and Telegram; Telegram will chug along even on trickle, Slack will just have annoying banners say NO SIGNAL and even though it's back already, it still hangs for way too long), not having the people I want on it and more. But yes, for the simple reason of no default e2e, I use multiple chat apps, but Telegram is simply the most comfortable; if it had proper (by default) e2e for everything, I would 'live' in it. I don't mind (I find it better) to store a key somewhere like Threema and Element, but these things are unusable UX wise (and very slow...). Then whatsapp with it's restrictions bound to your mobile and unencrypted backups anyway is not good and as well, it's just worse.