Onboarding Friction and Spreads with Prop Firms - Is it Just Me?

Hey everyone, wanted to get some collective wisdom on an issue I've been noticing more and more lately with prop firm challenges and live accounts. I've been grinding through a few challenges recently, mostly focusing on forex pairs like $EURUSD and $GBPUSD, and the inconsistency in spreads and the overall onboarding process has been a real headache. It seems like some firms have smooth KYC/KYB, but then you get to the actual trading environment and the spreads are fluctuating wildly during crucial times, or their execution is just slow. Then you have others with excellent trading conditions, but the hoops you have to jump through just to get funded, or even just to get past the initial challenge verification, are bordering on ridiculous. It's almost as if no firm has nailed both sides of the equation. Is this a universal experience, or am I just hitting a string of bad luck? Any insights on how you vet firms for both their operational efficiency (onboarding, payout reliability) and their actual trading infrastructure (spreads, liquidity, execution)? It feels like a constant trade-off and I'm curious if anyone has found a firm that truly offers a robust solution on all fronts.