I think lemmy's purpose was originally more geared towards each instance having its own profile. So you would switch between them to enjoy different types of content. That's my guess anyway.

I will have to disagree with you on both points.

Point 1: Not finding the settings.

Whenever you join an app, platform or start up a new video game, you need to go to the settings and set your preferences. This is something very logical at the beginning as you have no idea what to expect. Additionally the settings in lemmy/jerboa are very minimal. You can set them up in about a minute. Claiming this is not user friendly is not a valid argument to be honest since Jerboad doesn't have them hidden. It's users who ignore the settings.

Point 2: Some users can’t even figure out how to login using the app.

Lemmy, kbin and mastodon all implement the same protocol named ActivityPub but they all choose to make their front-end fundamentally different despite having access to the same content. This ecosystem doesn't do everything for you and it doesn't claim to. People, including myself, found out about this ecosystem from external resources and not from lemmy itself. It took me about 4 minutes to figure out what to do and where as I actively wanted to figure it out. If people can't bother for 3-4 minutes to figure things out(Even just clicking the Join button) then I don't see what improvement any platform can do to improve this. If anyone clicks on the Join button the go to registration and then to login. It's very different to reddit but very simple.

I love active as an option! But right now, it being the default, it just makes people keep commenting on the same posts every day. I'd use it much more if it wasn't the default.