F-Droid's UI is trash in terms of usability IMO.
Quite clunky.
If that was your issue too there are various frontend forks that fix that issue in better ways than F-Droid has attempted to.
I for one use FoxyDroid which is about as minimal as it gets, but still usable and pretty to look at.
There's also AuroraDroid (best looking one IMO), and G-Droid as alternative frontends.
Free associating? I never experienced F-Droid before or since my scattered Cyanogen/LineageOS experiments. Honestly, I doubt I'm alone making that distinction (similar to how its hard to make a distinction between javascript and jquery when you're first learning)
Honestly I'm a little confused about the DIY mobile software landscape, and would love to get a minimalist, open-source wonderland mobile OS - and I wouldn't even mind if it was browser native, and neither should anyone else because WASM.