I agree with this but I have an alternate point/theory/perspective to propose. I don’t think a lack of polish alone is a major reason for lack of adoption, etc. Why? Because I have many of the same or similar frustrations with other tools like ClickUp and Notion (some of which you yourself have mentioned as well). Perhaps the prime example is Roam which has often felt fragile to me at times, with tons of quirks around page auto-complete order ranking, weird formatting stuff, and all kinds of other BS. And yet it is massively successful, so far at least. Likewise Notion and ClickUp, the latter of which I think gets these quirky or unpolished behaviors because it moves so fast in product update and release in general, it’s essentially inevitable.
So the point I want to make is not that your concerns aren’t valid and shouldn’t be addressed, rather I think that Fibery is in a unique position where, unlike Notion it doesn’t have the blocks/dashboard hook, or the blocks/outlining/transclusion/references magic of Roam, and unlike ClickUp it isn’t as immediately intuitive, thus it has the well-known-to-us (and Fibery team) difficulty of communicating its actual value and power to overcome already. Then you add in a lack of polish and quirkiness in some areas, and it’s sort of a one-two punch that may significantly hurt adoption. I just wanted to make this point because I think it can be frustrating to see that other tools still succeed despite being very “quirky”, buggy, hacky, etc.
I might actually say this, too: solving the problem of the initial learning curve (and/or finding product market fit) is hard. Hopefully do-able with a combination of docs/training and ongoing improvements to the system, tools, defaults, etc. but it’s not a short-term fix, nor one where you can likely predict the “end”. It’s true that polishing things also probably has no end, at least since other changes keep being made and features keep being added (that themselves need polish), but adding polish is at least a more understandable and somewhat quantifiable thing where progress can be clearly made. It involves a lot less trial and error, user research, etc. than trying to improve onboarding and ease of use, I think. So it seems like a key area where improvements in user retention could be made. That said if retention is not really a major issue, polish is not going to help with reaching new customers in the first place…