The worst thing about notes was its ui revamp in 8. It was heavy and slow, I tended to run classic ui. Yes f5 was an issue but only until you did it a couple of times then you remembered.

It was funny I recall never having much to do on the domino server, and even the client was pretty stable. When we migrated to Outlook there were non stop server side issues.

The fact it had a built in DB was really useful for extension as well.

Imo it was ahead of its time and heavily hamstring by Outlook dominance as any nee user landing hated it simply because it wasn't outlook