people talk about solana ux but every time i've wanted to swap in phantom i've had transactions fail 5+ times before going through. is this better or worse ux than paying $50 for a swap when the chain is under high load?

The reason the UX is good for certain apps and bad for others is completely reliant on who built it and how. 

Helius has some really helpful documentation on how to get transactions through for your users but the infrastructure required is relatively expensive depending on your use case. 

Trading highly contentious launches genuinely requires running your own infra or being willing to slip hard. 

Staked RPC + priority fee + JITO bundle and you might hit.

Yeah many people struggle with this when using phantom. I think the simplest answer is that it’s really not meant to be a trading tool and the swaps are a convenience method. 

There are so many trading bots and such now (Photon, BullX, gmgn, Bonk, etc.) that enable HFT activity

Interesting. Maybe a wallet issue then (why doesn’t phantom do this)