Designer here, how can we solve this? I'd love to have my work peer reviewed because design is so subjective and I feel like I'm probably making elementary mistakes despite learning for years.
Serious suggestion... Open up a text editor, and lay out your functionality in 80 columns wide, and 25 lines high... This is how it was in the really old days with text interfaces... everything comes up fast, you can create boxes to isolate information, but literally can only fit so much text on the screen... Now, take this, and turn it into a relatively scaling gui... for mobile, go 40x50.
There is something to be said from experience as an ansi artist and a sysop in the bad old days before the web.
One big problem I see is, that power users need something quite different than first time users. You can make some compromise by tucking away advanced features without removing them, but in general it's still an issue.
First time users are probably what you focus on, the rest just has to be a tad better than the competitors. First time users need to be convinced by pretty design and a super simple linear workflow that solves just one problem.
Power users couldn't care less about design (SAP is still alive). They love it feature packed and want to access as many options as possible with few clicks. The extremes are icons without labels, color coded shortcuts on every keyboard key¹ or command line interfaces.
But it's easy enough to initiate those behind menu options, with hotkey combinations available in general... That's how advanced usability options are usually done. You don't have to show it all onscreen at once.
There is something to be said from experience as an ansi artist and a sysop in the bad old days before the web.