I'm surprised there's really much alternative. My schools either used Moodle or Blackboard and Blackboard was absolutely awful since it was a product of just acquiring and suing companies out of competition.

Now there’s canvas as another paid alternative to blackboard. I think it’s seeing relatively wide adoption.

My school uses Canvas and I think general sentiment is pretty positive from both students and faculty.

Canvas suffers from being originally designed for use in elementary (K-12) school, and then kind of wedged into college. On the teaching side it kind of assumes that classes will always be relatively small (running a 100+ student seminar class in Canvas is a nightmare) and that you, the teacher, don't mind performing the same actions over and over and...

But, it's one of the few LMSs designed post-Web 2.0 so things that require a refresh or reload in BB, etc., generally happen much more smoothly.

IMO all LMS's are complicated with a lot of customization knobs and poor UX/workflows.

These days I like Brightspace (aka D2L) the best, but that could be just because the way I interact with it.

(I write LMS integrations for a living).

On the other hand our school was moving to Moodle from something else (I think it was called Blackboard? Maybe https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blackboard_Learn?) and it was an absolute pleasure compared to the alternative (which a few courses still used). There were definitely a few clunky parts (like the form) but overall it worked, was reasonably fast and wasn't awful. This was a student PoV though, really I just needed it to render some rich-text content provided by the prof and the occasional assignment submission or quiz. IDK if setting these things up was particularly painful.

This was about 8 years ago now, IDK if it got worse or better since then.

Hope your school wasn't moving to Blackboard ...