Solana

Been playing with Solana a lot more lately, but price quotes are sluggish, 50% of my trades fail, trades take ~15 seconds to complete, and I have to break my trades up into much smaller increments to get them through. 

Any tips on how to get a better experience here? Moved my slippage up to 1% and that helped.

summoning /daylight | kylemccollom.com | we are hiring: careers.daylight.xyz

The answer seems to be much higher slippage. Doesn’t that defeat the purpose of low gas fees? 

In fact you in up paying a lot more in slippage than if gas was $0.10.

Really depends what you are trying to trade.  If we're talking about memecoins for example, on Solana the liquidity to marketcap ratio for most memecoins is *much* higher (not a good thing) than your average Ethereum memecoins.  Base memecoins are kind of a middle-ground between the two.

Internet nerd with internet nerd interests 

Will come back and edit this later

In order to give you advice on what you can do to make the experience better, it'd help to have more of an idea on what exactly you were trying to trade, as well as what method you were trying to do so.  A huge percentage of people on Solana are using bots to trade compared to other chains, so UX on a DEX suffers.