There definitely are growing pains, but in think all things considered it is moving in the right direction. As much as I wish it were different, expecting lemmy to instantly match and replace reddit (that had a ton of time to organically grow) is wishful thinking.

Have you tried signing up on other instances? That determines a lot of the performance you are getting. Personally lemmy.world at the time I signed up was having issues (might be better now), which made me try out lemm.ee . So far it has treated me very well performance wise.

As far as apps are concerned I am on android so I can comment for its, but connect has been my choice this far. Works fairly well, although not perfect. However in all apps I've tried the speed of progress has been very encouraging.

Lastly concerning submissions without comments, lemmy simply still doesn't have a user base to rival reddit. So in some way we have to be the change we want to see, otherwise things will never change.

Personally I have given up on reddit, but I wouldn't fault you for using it alongside lemmy for a while. I'd just hate to see people like you stop using lemmy completely just because it can't instantly replace a platform that had such a massive head start.