A lot of the issues you're describing can probably be attributed to the stock firmware. For whatever reason the manufacturers of these devices ship them with firmware on it that functions and manages to do little else.

There are a lot of community options (depending on the device of course) that make them far easier to use and in some cases more performant too.

Yes, they can be a little pricey but for less than 100 bucks you can probably fit it in your budget. If you can't, well, the device you're using reddit on can probably also emulate games, so, you can get your fix that way.