Exactly this. I can’t claim to really know what Fibery’s adoption problem is, and growth is hard, I get it. But there is definitely a market awareness problem, and rarely have I seen greater misalignment between the actual quality and capability of a product and its actual visibility and reach in the market. Amazing Marvin is another tool that comes to mind in that respect, and ironically it too has some UI/UX/ease of use problems from extreme power and flexibility. 
But it’s got other challenges going on too, ones that I don’t think Fibery has.
The thing that’s interesting here though is that most of what Fibery team talks about in terms of growth seems to be about “How do we show people Fibery’s value quickly, once they try the tool.” That’s obviously super important, but something is stopping Fibery from being in the conversation in the first place as much as it should be. Something is keeping people from even becoming aware of Fibery, and that to me is the greater problem. I know various marketing efforts have been tried and failed, so it’s not like the team is not trying to grow its reach, but I do wonder if the wrong tack is being taken there. Many of the other more successful tools have relied heavily on word of mouth, in some form, user-driven marketing. And I suspect the issue for Fibery is in part that it’s an “oddball” tool that’s a bit hard to recommend to most people at this point due to it being yes, super powerful, but also well… just feeling a bit clunky in some fundamental ways.
Anyway, I know the team is aware of this, to be sure. But for me a focus on these baseline functions, the things fundamental to our work, seems a likely source of potential growth and increased adoption. What I come back to is that Fibery is amazing for setting all this fancy stuff up, but once you do that, and/or as a “regular” (non-admin) user, you still come back to a lot of the same basic activities and user patterns as most other tools, just based on an extremely flexible system that may involve a bunch of fancy stuff behind the scenes. But in the end it’s mostly represented to the user in ways that are extremely similar to the user as other tools. The way people interact with the system comes down to similar basic stuff. And when some major part of that interaction is way worse than the more visible tools in the space, it surely has a notable effect.
For me this comes a lot down to notifications and how I keep track of and interact with my work and changes to it. The experience there is… pretty bad. I hate to say it, I love Fibery, you all know I’m a Fibery booster But unless I’m missing some better way of doing things, notifications through automations are just a terrible experience. Mostly it comes down to a bunch of unnecessary and seemingly non-customizable aspects of automation-driven notifications. Since automations are the way to notify on e.g. due dates, and all automations seem to have “Automations” prefixed, then every notification has that, which is… well, almost completely useless and unnecessary. Likewise I should be able to determine myself whether the database name (in my case “Task”) is included in the notification, and whether my email address and indeed the Fibery logo are included (currently they’re the first thing I see in email notifications). I get why these things are there, at least by default, and yes there are absolutely situations where you’d want the DB name to be included. But not every situation, to be sure.
It all just feels really clunky. And the thing is, a lot of that seems pretty easy to fix. None of this is complicated, “advanced” stuff. That’s not what I, at least, am wanting. I actually want simple, “clean” notifications. As it is every single one is so filled with boilerplate of the same info each time, my eyes just glaze over looking at my email or in-app notifications. This is what I see in my in-app notifications:
Same prefix (“Automations”), same icon, etc. It’s just mind-numbing. You’d think an app like Fibery, based on customization, would let you turn off some of that boilerplate (and maybe it does and I just don’t know how, but if that’s the case, then it needs to be made more obvious).
And yes, some other apps like Notion have some of these problems too, but A: Notion’s task management is widely considered to not be great, so it’s not exactly a benchmark to aspire to and B: even Notion has notable advantages over Fibery, e.g. Inbox, Following, and All views, and a way to dismiss a notification. Unless I’m blind, Fibery doesn’t even have that. The sheer fact that you cannot clear notifications is a major indicator that Fibery’s notifications approach is broken. It exposes a fundamental misunderstanding (or perhaps more likely just a lack of prioritization) of how a lot of people feel interacting with something like that in an app. People want to process and get to “Inbox Zero”! It viscerally feels bad to open your notifications and see them all still sitting there. Yes, you can “mark as read”, but that’s not the same thing.
You’re absolutely right @Chr1sG that Fibery is better than even some industry-leading tools in certain respects. Search is one of them, at least in some (important) respects and I wouldn’t call that out as a “fundamental usability problem” personally, at the moment. I find notifications handling to be far more egregious, along with a few other core/key issues like how due dates and reminders are handled. I am not suggesting that Fibery needs to become “easy and simple” like some other tools, only that there are certain key areas where usability and ease of use matter a lot more IMO. And I hope we can see some notable improvement in those areas sooner than later, because I think they may be important to Fibery’s near-term and long-term growth and adoption.