[parennoob]

I think rather than negativity and "triumph at someone's mistakes", it may be a combination of:

1. They are comparing themselves to a successful commercial product (the iPhone / iPad) which was orders of magnitude more polished and performant when it was released. This is complete rubbish and is going to raise the hackles of people who have worked on and delivered decent product.

2. There are pull requests on their repo three months old that have not been merged. People are fixing problems for them, but these fixes are not being merged -- not even the simple typo fix ones.

3. This site is supposed to be a guide for acquiring something you are legally required to have (or you face a financial penalty). The bar for usability for such a site should be way higher than "redirect to a a phone line every time we get a lot of traffic".

[brigade]

Re: 3, have you actually used other government sites? Particularly for tax returns, which approximately the same percentage of people have legally been required to file for decades?

Not saying it's great, but when compared to tax returns and particularly other health insurance sites, its usability is downright fantastic.

[avoutthere]

Also, it's fair for any U.S. citizen to critique the site, since we are paying for it.

[parennoob]

Well, even non-U.S. citizens who work in the U.S. on visas pay for the site through their taxes. In fact, they also pay for Social Security and Medicare without generally being eligible to receive either of those benefits.

[pstack]

Many Americans also pay for both of those without being eligible to receive either of those benefits. I count both of those items as additional taxation, in my case.