When I want to have back and forth between people on a regular basis, I choose chat apps. Mastodon feels like it's trying to be a poorly designed chat app.
You don't need to access information via the relay. You can have a client get information directly from PDSes or Appviews that don't get their information from the relay.
I hope they start supporting people who want to run an indexer. Right now they just point to their source code and say, "if you can get this largely undocumented complex service running on your own, you can run a indexer, but don't ask us for any help".
I'm not entirely confident that it will happen before their only funding source decides to cut off the cash flow.
there are distinct cultures between different instances and it is a strength of the Fediverse that instances are not just faceless pieces of infrastructure, i.e. pipes to content, but rather thriving communities with real people behind them.
I agree with most of what you said, just wanted to let you know that the tone wasn't optimal for facilitating understanding.
Have a nice weekend.