It's unfortunate, but I've had many poor experiences with Lightning as well, mainly failed payments when trying to use a vendor's pay with bitcoin option. These things happen even when I'm using my own custodial wallet.

It can be a hard to diagnose the problem, like whether the issue was no route found, or some configuration error on the vendor's side. In these cases, i'm pretty sure the configuration error is not on my side, because i've successfully used my custodial wallet to pay in other instances.

I'm not sure how to make the UX better. Maybe the big LN processors need to make use of ghost channels, or something.