However, the question should be asked: is it normal to need an aid to create an account?
Yes. When Hive is approached as social media, then there is a problem, because Hive is still a crypto with social media elements. When approached as crypto, onboarding is not that bad. Could be better? Certainly. I've only invited two people so far, but I made their accounts using cli_wallet, so I have a hard time imagining anyone else's experience could be any worse 😜
Having a Facebook account is like renting a hotel room. In comparison, having Hive account is like owning a house - completely different set of possibilities and responsibilities. It is better when new users are made aware of that difference and guided by a person familiar with the chain, because skipping that steps can easily bite them in the future.
There is an ongoing need for someone to "build a hotel" on Hive for people who might not want the hassle of "owning a house". Splinterlands sort of did that with their trial accounts. The idea of allowing people to log in with their Web2 social media accounts without owning Hive account to interact (through proxy) with the chain shows up periodically for quite some time. Maybe the idea will finally come to fruition as part of recent topic/work on "lite accounts".
Is this how normal apps work?
Yeah. Apps have bugs. I'm not using Keychain and only use Ecency Mobile as last resort, but I did experience that particular bug (although in my case time rewinds 4 days). The good thing is that you can actually reach not only developers, but also people that make decisions on where to allocate development time. Imagine being able to talk to Mark Zuckerberg or Elon Musk and point them to the bug that annoys you.
Especially since they receive hundreds of HBDs every day.
It is not really all that much. 600 HBD daily is just 18k a month. Even on Polish market you have to assume 5k + taxes for a single full time dev. Add office, equipment, accounting etc. Can you make it cheaper? Sure, but there are two ways. You get juniors - they require supervision and if they are good enough to actually do the work, you'll want to keep them for longer, which leads to second way - build larger team that will handle multiple projects. But for decent size team you'd have to round the daily pay up and make it hourly pay instead.
I'm starting to have serious concerns about the sense of decentralization
No way. One front-end does not show the post properly? There are 5-6 other to choose from. Default server died? Switch to another.
Yes. Application hopping can be frustrating when what you want to do does not work. Some time ago I was given a link on chat to the article by my coworker. I wanted to write a reply, so I connected my phone to the PC, run DeX there and then Ecency Mobile. I did that so I could paste the link from the chat to Ecency. While Ecency can copy a link to the article you are watching, there is nowhere to paste the link from outside. Doh... I'm not following that author, so no easy shortcut to his profile to get to article. So I tried to use search. Searching for author, for title nor for first sentence gave any useful results. Seriously, search in Ecency Mobile is completely useless. But I remembered, that I've wrote a reply to some earlier article of the same author. So I went to my profile, to comments and scrolled down... only first 10 comments loaded, the rest was hidden under "eternal loading circle". Eh... But I remembered I actually might have my posting private key imported in cli_wallet. If I pulled it out of there, I could use it to write reply on hive.blog. I wasn't sure so I listed all keys and there were many (most to some test accounts). cli_wallet doesn't show key-to-account association, so I turned to hiveblocks.com for answer which key is the correct one. Buuut... the server died long ago and it does not seem like it would come back alive any time soon. So I tried fresh block explorer - hivescan.info. Argh!! it didn't have authorities listed. I had to dig out some other block explorer from bookmarks.
But you know what? In the end I succeeded, new block explorer now shows the authorities and I also started to use HiveAuth for signing. If it was Facebook with any blocking issue, I'd be stuck until enough people complained about the same problem.
I started my adventure with crypto when it was a norm to run the nodes locally. hived can be run locally no problem, but it is not enough. To serve front-ends you need a lot of space for databases. Hopefully the idea of pruning, that was recently implemented for block log, will be applied to HAF and Hivemind, so it is possible to run such servers locally with couple days worth of recent data 🤞
I understand your point of view, but I would still wish for less bugs and better UX ;)