It is absolutely possible to have a Matrix deployment that works seamlessly. It's true though that a lot of people are very unhappy at the transition from Element to Element X, hence the recent complaining threads. You can see a response from me as Matrix project lead (and Element CEO) here: https://gist.github.com/ara4n/190ad712965d0f06e17f508d1a45b5.... Meanwhile, we're working hard at landing both threads and spaces in Element X (they're available behind feature flags already).

The only reason people seem to complain about Element Call being hard to set up is that it's new and unfamiliar and doesn't have much docs yet, and VoIP is always a pain from a firewalling perspective. It's a hell of a lot simpler to setup and run than Jitsi, for instance. But if you run it via ESS Community (https://element.io/server-suite/community) or even https://github.com/element-hq/element-docker-demo it should work fine.