I'm by no means surprised that most mainstream solution were non-starters for the website as it needs to function quite differently. To me it's also quite understandable that building a custom solution to prevent or mitigate such attacks would take more time than just implementing Cloudflare (which was surprisingly a suggestion I saw on multiple occasions).

On one hand, not being able to use steemit.com reliably for some time was quite frustrating, but the fact that it took some time to get it back to normal with the infrastructure upgrades I'm sure were made was not surprising by any means and I think a lot of steemians showed a bit of undue impatience.

I really hope all issues are behind us :)