I'll not talk about the shortterm mess this HF20 has caused, because plenty of others have already gone before me and all has probably already been said.

Instead, I'd like to talk about the added longterm confusion. We used to have Steem, Steem Power, Steem Dollars. This is a hard thing to wrap your mind around when you're just starting out here, especially as a regular blogger kinda person. Now, we have RC and Mana. Not 'instead', but as an added difficulty. Please understand how huge the learning curve is becoming. If you want more users and be 'mainstream', things should be easy to learn, they should not become more difficult like they just did with HF20.

Also, even if you don't understand all of the terms, at the very least a user should be able to easily see why they can't do something. Why does the system not allow them to post, comment, upvote, whatever? What the heck is wrong with their account? It will be RC ofcourse, but that's confusing. And how do they even know their RC?

They have to go off-site towards steemd.com to figure out why their steemit.com account isn't working.

That's where the pretty mana/rc bars are found. Not on steemit.com. Not everyone knows about steemd.com. Heck, I was poking around on steemdb.com at first, until I reading multiple user posts to found out my little 'typo' mistake. If a user of two years gets confused by this, how do you think a new user will feel now? Besides that, and I can't believe these words still have to be said, anything important about the functioning of a certain site should be found on that particular site.

Please, please work on steemit.com UI...

(Or you know... just come right out and say that you don't care about steemit.com and will only be focussing on other Steem projects. But again, as clear information on the steemit.com site itself.)

Oh, and if you do decide to work on steemit.com, please add some handy features like filtering a certain user's blog by tag, or a notification system which shows you every post/comment you've been mentioned in (horrible for whales, but handy for the majority of us).

User experience needs so much love!

In the years that I've been here, I've grown to love Steemit, but the user experience is being neglected and it is just so sad for me to see. I want Steemit to succeed and grow bigger, go mainstream and fight off all of its competitors (plenty are popping up now). I just don't see that happening if user experience doesn't improve. Having a shot at mainsteam means building for the 'weakest minds', not the sharpest minds that exist in cryptoland.