Ah thanks for explaining! Yeah the inability to purchase it directly on local exchanges is a bummer, although if localmonero vendors are available in your area, you may be able to pay them using your local bank account too.
These days you definitely don’t have to download the entire blockchain to use it; you can just connect to someone else’s node. But if you want to restore an old wallet, you unfortunately do have to run through each blockchain transaction after the wallet was created, to see if any of those transactions belong to you. There’s also a mobile app nowadays called Cake Wallet.
All in all, I agree that it’s not the friendliest crypto to use, unfortunately. Its main selling point is privacy, and criminals are more incentivized than others to protect their privacy, so I’m not sure how it’ll ever shake off that image.