This is a fabulous guide to bitshares and other aspects of cryptocurrencies. The way you did it, detailing your progress rather than writing a professional guide, makes for something far easier to follow than most guides.
I am already where you are because I needed some BTS for a project I'm working on, but I'm on my third wallet because I made some mistakes. No money lost, just time, but it would be easy to screw it up and lose all your hard-earned money. I triple-check anything where I absolutely positively have to keep the password safe on pain of penury.
I did not necessarily have to have a dash in my wallet name, but I had to have some non-alpha character. I think you need to be a lifetime member to not need a special character, although how you become a lifetime member without a wallet I neither know nor care. I'm happy with 3l instead of el.
I know that feeling all too well of punching the button and then waiting, sometimes for hours, heart in mouth, wondering where my coins went.
Coinbase is not intuitive, but we both found what we needed eventually.
We both got where we wanted to be in the end, but I think the way you've written this, with all the circles and arrows and a paragraph on the back of each one (whoops, that was Alice's Restaraunt) with all your notes, will make the next person's journey a lot easier.
Trust me, I'm a doctor.
Thank you for the reply of your experience. I hadn't intended it to be guide to creating a wallet but some have commented it seems to suit that purpose. I did notice when submitting that I kind of put the cart before the horse speaking to becoming a lifetime member. I didn't want to rewrite it. But to your point I had the wallet first. Deposited some btc. Then saw the value of lifetime membership when it came to trading. Figured would bite the bullet right away and buy the membership. Had a little buyers remorse after that I might have acted to quickly but feeling good that I did now. Would like it to be my main trading platform but it will need to bring in many more coins. I think there is real potential getting in on the ground floor of companies that will grow from there.