One way or the other, it’ll take time to be on par with the feature set of the good features of reddit (so everything before Steve Huffman got CEO if I remember right), especially in a federated way.

Also I don’t think it’s at least currently the goal to get the whole reddit userbase onto lemmy (apart from the obvious technical scaling issues that’ll arise). It was just an “unfortunate” consequence of reddits announcements that led to the sudden flush of a lot of reddit users onto lemmy. I think it needs (still) quite some time to get federation and the UX around it right (and I’m talking about basic features like user migration). Two people are just not enough, but few very passionate and idealistic/perfectionistic people will likely achieve quite a bit. Because of the announcement a lot of devs will likely contribute to the lemmy ecosystem (which is actively happening right now, if you’ll check the repos). Give it a little bit of time. I think a good maintained open source project can actually progress faster and with higher quality than most of the closed source alternatives (since I’m working in that area, a good example is Blender vs alternatives, which as of now has surpassed quite a few “competitors” with way fewer people developing it). You don’t need a lot of money for that (although obviously it would be better, let it just be for infrastructure cost).

Also github issues and PRs (or other similar platforms) actually reflect “addressing the needs” quite well. I myself have experienced it a few times and I’m seeing it in a few user-faced apps and repos a lot: I want one particular feature and it’s not implemented yet, so either I open an issue, describing my feature request well, or I start implementing it (if it’s either small, or a feature that’ll likely everyone wants), and often a lot of people want that feature too (visible e.g. via emojis), I think it’s even healthier than this layered view between corporations/operator and the user, as the user has to actively think through the feature, invest more (time) into it (even if it’s just opening a feature request issue). It’s not as easy as contacting the support, and complaining about things (which issues will likely not be communicated to devs the way it should be). Active collaboration is IMHO quite a good innovative driver.