Does federation have a bit of a learning curve? No doubt.
Is Lemmy buggy as heck? Absolutely.
But I don’t think that really justifies a lot of the comments I’m seeing in Reddit alternatives threads that it’s hard to figure out. The front page feed and sort options are very similar to Reddit. Searching for same-instance communities is not too difficult. Posting, commenting, and voting are all quite intuitive. What’s the problem?
One community on one server will eventually become the “default”. Like the other guy said, there were a LOT of really closely named subreddits. It’s not a problem. One will eventually become the biggest, and that will be the top search result. This is already happening.