HN user
Not sure we want to "win". If endusers want apps "to just work" without "paying up", then I would recommend them to stay with Whatsapp.
That kind of users aren't worth the hassle if they have no money.
I personally have better relationships with people that enjoy learning something new, and coming up with solutions for issues themselves, eventually contributing to the ecosystem.
While it's never fun to receive negative feedback, it'll only help to improve the product.
Still, I run Matrix servers since inception of the project (10 years now \o/), and for an experienced system administrator this is not something difficult to do.
If you think running a Matrix server is difficult, you are probably not the intended audience: running an IRC server, an email server, or some other server, is mostly similarly difficult.
Matrix is a communication protocol, and it is not intended to be touched by end-users. If your goal is to just communicate on the matrix network as an enduser, stay away from matrix. I haven't seen an email enduser who browsers to https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc5321.html, to figure out how to sign up for hotmail.....
Element on the other hand, IS intended to be userfriendly, and there is obviously a lot of room for improvement. But through the years I experienced that users who want to use Element to stay in touch with their loved once, have no problem with that.
Lastly I think comparing an open source project like Matrix/Element to Publicly traded corporations like Slack or Meta, is not fair. They operate with totally different business models. If you'd compare the quality of Matrix/Element to Slack in relation to annual budget, Slacks ROI would be depressing.