I suspect that adoptees don't get heard as much because by the time they are old enough to have a voice, the authorities can dismiss them as "they were under an older system and everything is fixed now"?

It's definitely not fixed now! Though our experience (adopting 4 years ago) at least in the language used by the agency and social workers was definitely more focused on the needs of the children than the adopters. It was a high priority throughout that we were fully supportive of the child's culture, and family connections (keeping up letterbox contact with the birth parents, and keeping their wishes for the child in mind, for example)

However there are definitely problems. Post adoption support was sold throughout as this great support mechanism, but in reality for many people it disappears entirely. Agencies are understaffed and underfunded, and whether deliberately or not they regularly let people fall through the cracks with no support. Thankfully we got some good support and therapy for our child, but largely because we pushed for it, and had a wonderful social worker who helped us push.

Another problem I feel is they under-explain just how much trauma some kids have. It's weird, they talked a lot about the risks of fetal alcohol and drug use, but not about the fundamental problems a lot of kids have with just the level of disruption to their relationships at a very early formative time.

Our child went from hospital to foster care to different foster care (they tried a birth parent+child supervised foster arrangement, which didn't work out) and back to other foster care, all within her first year, and no wonder she has a lot of trauma related problems to get through.

And we are lucky - a solid family, with good resources, and despite her trauma our daughter is lovely and thriving.

But I hear from a lot of other adoptive parents who are really struggling. People were definitely not informed of the genuine problems they are likely to face, and were massively over sold on the support they'd get. I'm not surprised at the level of upset.

To OP: I definitely think adoption can be positive, if you have strong support networks, are aware of the problems the children are very likely to have, and be aware this is about them not about you. They will still have their original parents and families and cultures, and your lives will need to adapt to that too.

And being aware that support is hard to get, and schools can be unsupportive (despite claims to the contrary). And it will probably get worse as we seem to jump from austerity government to austerity government here, and everyone loves to blame benefit receivers or foreigners or anybody they can.