I understand back-end infrastructure takes a long time to build up, I understand that content and users also takes a long time.

But there is no excuse for how piss poor the branding and "Look" of all of these sites are.

A few grand and a few days of putting the sites in the hand of some talented designers and illustrators would make these sites many times more appealing to end users.

Are they even trying to get new users? Each and every one of these sites looks like something thrown together by a first year web dev for a rushed project. The color schemes, the logos, the buttons, the fonts. They're all piss poor.