Problem with Steemit Infrastructure

This is truly meant as a question. Is there a problem with the infrastructure that Steemit operates on? I have no evidence that there is nor am I trying to cast blame in any certain direction. But recently I have been noticing some differences in the way Steemit operates.

When I first started Steemit (January, 2018) I could make a transaction from my wallet and the transaction was displayed in my wallet history within a few seconds. Lately, this may take a minute or two. Maybe this is an intentional change where the code was specifically modified to do so, for what reason I can't imagine. But if it's not intentional, what would cause this?

My second observation is that I have been receiving transaction broadcast errors lately. Over the last few days this has become more and more frequent. It's not a huge hassle, the system saves my transaction information and I only have to resend the transaction. Yesterday, I received two of these in a row and the transaction finally went out on the third attempt. It's not a big problem, but couple it with having to wait to see your transaction show up in the history (to verify it really went through) starts to get a little annoying.

Along with these wallet type issues, sometimes Steemit is non-responsive on my browser. Sometimes, I can hit reload and it works, other times I need to go to a different page on Steemit than the one I was on to make it work. Additionally, some of the auxiliary programs written to support the Steemit community (steemstats, steemd, etc.) sometimes give an error about connecting to the blockchain.

What makes me think this could be an infrastructure problem is history. I was in college at the start of the personal computer age, before laptops, the use of a mouse, the internet, or windows. As the personal computer industry developed I noticed that sometimes the software development would get ahead of the hardware development, resulting in slow response to user input and sometimes errors. Eventually there would be a release of new hardware technology that leapfrogged the software taking care of these problems. This happened over and over again.

The problems I am seeing on Steemit, although small problems, remind me of the times when software outpaced hardware. On Steemit, developers I realize have to deal not only with the software outpacing the hardware but also the user demand on the whole system. A couple of days ago, the bot @estabond had server issues that caused a problem. They handled the issue very well but to me it's just one more piece of evidence that the hardware aspects of the system need to be reviewed.