I took one class in college and didn't end up really liking Russian - didn't know it was a gendered language beforehand and I really dislike that, mostly because I'm lazy. Before taking the class, Russian cursive seemed absolutely illegible, but I got pretty good at reading and writing it afterwards.
However, I always thought it was weird we were only allowed to write in cursive in the class, where in English or other languages it's more of stylistic option. Our teacher told us everyone wrote like that and it was considered childish to write block letters instead, but she also told us everyone should read Gulag Archipelgo and that Solzhenitsyn was a great author. Was she right about the writing in cursive part though?
(Don't think this is appropriate for language learning since I'm not really asking for the sake of learning the language, so I posted in chat instead)
I've never seen real hand-written Russian that wasn't in cursive (barring my own, very childish writing, which sloppily mixes the two forms). A lot of articles online I read will have quotes written in typed-cursive too.
Since it's not a native language I hate it (the struggle of it for me). T lookin like cyrillic M and both also running together with Л, И lookin like a latin U and running together with Ш, ... Ранит мой мозг
It also stress markers are only ever written in beginner material. Since there's vowel shortening with stress and the stress can change the meaning of the word (писать или писать, to write or to piss?), you just always must check when coming across new words in text. I've even had Russian-English dictionaries that don't have stress markers.
And don't get me started on people dropping the umlaut that differentiates ё е (yo, ye).
If I were to reform Russian right now I would make stress markers obligatory (in addition to improving gendering). It would make it so much easier to learn, even though maybe it’ll look a bit cluttered.