"It's not as polished, though"

Of course it's not.

Kbin and Mastodon are spit and bubble gum, MacGuyver in a closet hacking out a working solution whereas the big names have development budgets counted in millions of dollars.

This has been the hardest thing to explain to people. Yes, there's the case where a lot of features probably should have been prioritized (in retrospect) but it's not a failing of the platform that it wasn't available with full feature parity to a company that spends millions of dollars a year developing and enhancing their website and spreading the load across a large server infrastructure, with hundreds (literally hundreds) of employees who do nothing but write code. For a living. Full time.

The 'in our spare time, after our day job' volunteer DIY army has done amazing shit here in the Fediverse, but (in my opinion) you come off like a bit of a dick when you ask why the volunteer-led hobby software doesn't have the hot shit features of a bigger platform.

It's fine to recognize the shortcomings of the software, but just realize it comes with certain tradeoffs.

For instance, you know something else we don't have here?

The rights to sell all your data or charge you for API access.