Polkadot Facade Feedback

We are working towards building better APIs to simplify the interacting with "Polkadot Network".

What do we mean here by Polkadot Network? Foremost Polkadot Relay Chain and System Chains (everything DOT related), and then other Parachains.

In a few months (and after gathering feedback via such issues), more details of this project will be shared. To give it a name for now, we are calling it "Polkadot Facade".

The aim of this issue is to learn about the instances where you had to interact with Polkadot Network (as defined above), and you found it difficult. This interaction can be in any form, but to help give you a mental model, I can categorize it as such:

1. 🤓 read: You had/wish to read something from the chain (most likely a pallet's storage / runtime-api), and you found it difficult.
2. ✍️ write: You had/wish to compose a transaction to do something, and you found it difficult.

A few notes:

1. I used the "had/wish" intentionally: I would like to hear both about scenarios that you had to do something, and they were hard, and those that you couldn't even figure out how to do because it was too hard.
2. You can focus both on single-network interactions, and multi-network (involving XCM) interactions. That being said, we will likely first consider single-network cases.
3. When it comes to reading, don't limit yourself to what can be read from the state of a certain block, historical queries also count.

Please feel free to reach out to me on Matrix (@kianenigma:parity.io) if need be.

No files, tests, or entry points are named. Start by describing a concrete read or write interaction with the Polkadot Relay Chain, a System Chain, or a parachain, including historical queries or XCM where relevant. Done means submitting specific difficult scenarios that can inform the proposed facade APIs.