@isotopp@chaos.social Ugh, I hate that people equate Element and Matrix as one thing. Element can't decide on maintaining one client and rewrites it regularly. They very weird ideas of onboarding and default to different login methods in different clients. Some of the clients don't even work on standard Matrix servers. Sadly it seems like we will never get away from this notion that Matrix==Element and tbh my client has its fair amount of issues as well.

Now I could explain all of the things you have experienced, but it doesn't change, that it is a bad experience. The servers are listed as "outdated", since they usually got added in the past and the server list regularly runs checks on what version is running on them now and if they are still online to calculate the labels. Arguably there should be some method to remove servers eventually, but being outdated for a few days should be fine (at least if there is no security issue).

Element X is a rewrite of Element, actually several of them. That the iOS version is not listed in the store anymore, is surprising to me, considering that Element X is in no way ready yet, but on iOS Element has basically been unmaintained for ages (or at least annoying bugs didn't get fixed), so possibly they judged it wasn't worth the effort anymore. Or nobody ever clicked the button "also available on macOS" for the old app, since that is a new macOS feature and not many people use iOS apps on their mac, when there are mac apps available.

Why you can't close the login window: The way that the user-interactive authentication works, is that the client has to keep some state to continue the request it needs to authenticate for (like the registration). Web clients should usually persist that, since the user can click away that window at any time, but Element does not. Native clients wouldn't really experience that issue usually and that part of Matrix is supposed to be replaced with OIDC anytime now, but it is still a really surprising experience. Otoh copying a link isn't something a lot of people do in my experience, so I would assume it barely comes up in user testing.

Your assumptions about the email verification in the end are wrong. It is talking about verification in the End-to-End Encryption sense. It is used to exchange old message keys as well as ensure that messages are actually sent between the right ends without a MITM. An email address won't give you access to your keys, that is only required for password resets and registration on some server. For E2EE you can either restore messages using a recovery key, a passphrase to derive the recovery key from or by verifying against another signed in device. That Element Android hangs on that screen, well, it is Element Android and in my experience terribly unreliable.