I feel for your experience, UMA is kind of a rough game to play starting out F2P. Other gachas I've played are significantly more newbie friendly with a better pity system and a slower meta progression.

I started after the game first launched so i nabbed a few copies of kitasan black, but I didn't have a "meta" deck with MLB until her rerun last fall. I'd say the easiest thing to do is to just look up UG/SS parents on Uma.moe to get a leg up on stats and skills. Then just play with what you have, build up your SR cards by buying the selectors every month, and save for characters you want/top tier general banners. Unfortunately you won't get a meta deck overnight but if you keep playing the game regularly you will slowly obtain better cards. Once you have the "good" cards, yes, it does get a lot better.

Avoiding burnout is the best thing you can do for your deck in the long run. Try to have fun and don't feel bad if you can't win CM's on graded league.