Recently, looking at the mempool feels like watching the morning rush hour: after you sign a transaction, you’re basically just “taking a number and lining up.” It sits in the pool first, while miners/sequencers pick which ones to bundle. When the network is congested, it’s even more obvious—one transaction can get stuck for a long time, pushed out of the way by someone else’s higher fee, and even if you change the fee and resubmit, the previous one may still be lingering in the queue. In the end, who gets picked up first depends entirely on the “congestion mood” at that moment. What I don’t regret is this… during every peak, I wait for two minutes first to observe the queue and the fee curve before I act; missing out on one transaction is better than getting stuck for half a day. Recently, there’s been a lot of sparring between L2s over TPS, fees, and subsidies. Sure, watching the drama is fun, but when you truly run into a kind of stampede-style congestion, the real difference in experience comes down to how that queue gets ordered and who cuts in line. Anyway, I care more about predictability now.