Cryptocurrencies as they are won't work in the real world, especially with the focus on investment and earning rather than making a usable transaction system. A £1.50 transaction (on testnet at least) ends up over £2 with network fees. The fees are fine if it's thousands but even then, it's free with the banking system. I can send a penny or £50,000 and neither cost me anything. Where is the incentive to use bitcoin when it costs more, takes longer to confirm payments, and if I snap another phone in half I've lost everything? Obviously if I actually used bitcoin then I'd have backups and multiple devices, but for most people that's just extra work when the system they know and use has none of these issues.
If crypto is going to become a viable transaction system for the masses, it needs to change and not be it's own "currency" that needs exchanging with massive price volitility.
It's clear that you aren't actually using Bitcoin on a daily basis. I do almost on a daily basis, and can tell you right now that I haven't paid more than $0.10 in fees for over a year, and that's me being generous. Me being less generous means fees of up to $0.05 and they almost always confirm by the first next block.
Where people tend to go wrong is that they try to consolidate too many inputs at once but not include a fee to match the byte size of the transaction. Altcoins might not charge you anything for such transactions because barely anyone uses them, but Bitcoin's block space isn't freely available like that.
As for the longer to confirm part, transactions through financial institutions never fully confirm. Usually there is a 180-360 day time frame where transactions can be reversed from the client side, but the institution can do so even 5-10 years later.