My better half and I just signed up with DirecTV Now, and I have all the same complaints as the OP.
The DirecTV Now app's interface is a joke. It's like someone described TV over the phone to someone who had never seen it before, and that person waited about 2 months before they tried to build the app based on their vague recollection of that phone call. They pushed it out the door as a Minimum Viable Product and now are waiting for people to complain so they can prioritize equally half-arsed patches, but there's no system for feedback, just a customer service hotline to India and the silent surveillance of all your viewing habits and whatever else the Roku knows about you.
In DTV Now you can look at the guide or you can watch TV, pick one. Going back to what you were watching after you go to the guide involves waiting a few seconds as it buffers. Sometimes it says your network is too slow, and you wait even longer, although I suspect it really is just doing crap in the background, trying to buffer something you already aborted or something it thinks you might want next. If you were watching something that was paused or not "live" then expect it to take even longer. Nothing is snappy.
It is also a mystery what will happen when you press a button; nothing is intuitive.
Miss something that was just said? Maybe you can go back, try it and see. Well wait for it to buffer... ah there it goes. Oh, it went too fast. Now you are back at the beginning.
Rewind and fast-forward are restricted, only working in certain situations, ensuring you watch lots of commercials, and mainly just moving a progress bar at the bottom of the screen so you have to guess where to stop. For the most part there is no skipping ahead, and definitely no slow-mo. Anything except pause means you gotta wait a second or three for buffering. Even just starting the app means waiting through a splash screen that implies (every time) a new version is installing to the Roku. First channel that comes up is always weather, not whatever you were on last.
Channels are only in alphabetical order, no numbers, and not grouped by type.
The guide doesn't just scroll, it animates the scrolling in a way that is really, really annoying. I won't bother describing it, just know that it's slightly better when you scrolling up than down.
Advanced options to customize your experience are nonexistent.
The Roku remote is a child's toy and feels like there is no way it can last. The Roku also is not very good with surround audio on some older TVs, so we have to keep it in stereo mode. Volume buttons on the side of the remote only control the TV, which is useless if your TV only sends digital audio at a fixed volume level to an AVR.
We also just canceled Dish after 8 years of slowly declining channel selection & quality, last year's UI update that completely hobbled the Hopper 1 and its remote, a WiFi adapter that suddenly decided to only work for less than a day at a time and only on 1 out of 5 reboots, picture freezing for 30-60 seconds at a time in clear weather ... possibly all things which could've been fixed by a Hopper 3 upgrade which we shouldn't have to beg for ... but when we called, we were not one of the lucky ones, or just not angry sounding enough, so they said we could not get an upgrade without paying more. Meanwhile we have been paying above average for our channel package for years, and they've dinged us with enough fees to pay for like 5 hardware upgrades over the years. So we're done. They are sending a box for the Hopper and a tech to pick it up but they'll leave the hardware on the roof in case we change our minds.
But anyway yeah, I miss some of the Dish UI features already, after seeing how bad DirecTV Now is. Unfortunately it's our only option. We want local channels, and OTA doesn't work here due to topography. One nice thing about DTV Now is we get TCM in the cheapo package. So it's a tradeoff, but overall a slight downgrade from cable/satellite. They could make it better if they put some effort into their app but I doubt they have any incentive to do that, just like Dish has no incentive to offer consistent customer service without people begging/screaming/writing to secret email addresses or just getting lucky.
