Building privacy-first applications feels like navigating a maze right now for most developers. You're juggling competing priorities—balancing true privacy guarantees with functional UX, managing cryptographic complexity, and wrestling with incomplete tooling that wasn't really built for this use case. The framework landscape is fragmented. Privacy requirements demand architectural decisions that traditional web dev stacks just weren't designed for. Layer-by-layer optimization becomes necessary, but documentation and community patterns remain sparse. Many devs find themselves reinventing solutions rather than leveraging mature libraries. The learning curve is steep, infrastructure costs can surprise you, and regulatory uncertainty adds another layer of risk. Yet despite these friction points, more developers are pushing forward because the demand for decentralized, privacy-preserving applications keeps growing. It's an exciting but genuinely challenging moment to be building in this space.