In general anecdotes aren't great for much unless you understand what the person is doing.
For example in the earlier days of the net lots of people just sucked with the search engines that existed while I found what I wanted quickly looking for in the same topic.
How you ask the question is still important, and will probably always be important.
Claude should be an order of magnitude better than that. So, I can't say I understand how your experience has been so bad. Very surprising.