Given the use case of monero as a privacy coin, I don't understand why anyone would use anything other than the official wallet running a full node. Yeah, you have to download the blockchain, host your own node, open ports for remote RPC access, harden the opened ports against intrusion, so on and so forth (or use Umbrel,) but that's the point. That's the only way to ensure your privacy, and if done right, your anonymity, which is what's great about Monero.
I have a
thread-tutorial for hosting a monero node on a Raspberry PiI can say that I, obviously, agree 100% with you, but, dude... it was a small pain at first. I had big problems with the node, in terms of wrong bandwidth allocation. I was consuming too much bandwidth with the node and I needed to find a solution
because my entire internet connection at home was getting laggy.
So, after running my own monero node, I used to connect my Feather wallet to the node. It was a good experience, after it was accomplished, but until reaching that point, it was frustrating, to say the least.
The initial download can be painful, but the reward is worth it. The first time I downloaded the Monero blockchain I was running under Starlink with about 18MB, which isn't bad but far from fast by today's standards. I don't recall it causing much heartburn in terms of lagging other tasks. At the time I was working from home and uploading and downloading somewhat large CAD files, spreadsheets, work related photos... I don't remember exactly how long it took, but I do recall it was significant amount of time, like maybe two weeks.