I tried Cardano DeFi for the first time and it was incredibly bad

Look I'm not someone who's just dipping their toes into DeFi for the first time, I've used other networks and various protocols and I want to know what went so wrong with my first Cardano experience. So please keep an open mind.

Here's my story:

Installed Nami wallet.

Started a withdrawal of just 5 Ada from Kraken to this wallet, it took 30 minutes (??) for funds to arrive.

Went to SundaeSwap, tried to swap 1 Ada for 1.4 Sundae but kept saying that I have insufficient funds, apparently Sundae has additional fees that I was not aware of (2.5 Ada + some refundable deposit of 2 Ada).

Waited another 30 minutes to withdraw more Ada.

Big red warning on the Sundae page that the network is heavily congested. Checked the explorer and blocks were indeed (85%+) full while running at 2 tps. How is that possible?

First 4 swap attempts failed with 0 warnings, nothing to be found on-chain in the explorer, just pending attempts that disappeared after reconnecting my wallet.

The 5th one I think was recorded on-chain and remained in pending.

40 minutes later another on-chain swap attempt magically appeared, probably from the first 4 "failed" txs. Wtf?

Tried to cancel this second order...cancellation pending with 0 feedback on what is happening, tried to cancel 3 more times... nothing.

Exactly one hour and 7 minutes later the first swap completed.

I'm used to getting near instant confirmations and swaps on other networks, 1 hour+ is definitelly the longest I've ever had to wait on any Dex by a factor of 1000x and combined with all the fails and weird behaviour that I got I can't call this a good UX. What exactly went so wrong and what's the solution? Please don't call me a fudder because none of this is made up and anyone can try it for themselves.