I work on Grafana Tempo and this is not at all how I see things. I'm sorry if you've had a bad experience, but we work quite hard to field questions, PRs, and suggestions.
Every day I wake up and spend at least an hour reading and responding to issues and PRs in the Tempo repo.
We are definitely investigating columnar formats in Tempo to store traces. We expect it to drastically accelerate search as well as open up more complex querying and eventually metrics from distributed tracing data.
However, we are currently primarily targeting Parquet as our columnar format in object storage.
Tempo can be spun up with docker compose using a local disk for ephemeral storage/querying: https://github.com/grafana/tempo/blob/main/example/docker-co...
Maybe this meets your needs?
> Jaeger is easier to setup/manage and has a better interface than Grafana/Tempo
What do you enjoy about the Jaeger interface? Perhaps it's a gap in Tempo we can improve.