The federal government is open and paying its bills, which means you can start looking at the other big story from the past few weeks: The startup of Obamacare’s marketplaces. But to fully appreciate what’s happening, you need a split screen.

On one side is the story you’ve heard so much about. In 36 states, the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) is operating the new insurance marketplaces, where non-elderly people without employer benefits can buy coverage on their own. This part of the rollout has gone … really badly. Two weeks after the sites went online, people are still have trouble setting up accounts and logging onto the system.

HHS is working feverishly to make improvements and the system's performance has improved incrementally. But people are still getting hung up at the initial stages, which means they never get the chance to apply for financial assistance and shop for plans. A study following web traffic showed a sharp drop-off in users at each successive stage of the online application process, which suggests the system was stopping a lot of people from moving forward. And that’s just the part of the system visible to consumers. Insurers say that the system is producing some incorrect information about the few people who make it through the process—a fixable problem, for sure, but a warning that other flaws may yet lurk undetected.

Administration officials have said they never expected so many initial visitors and that the high demand is a good sign. Both claims are true. But the system quite obviously suffers from serious design flaws. I’ve spoken to about a half-dozen developers in the week and they pointed to some of the same problems that experts in the Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, Kaiser Health News, and Slate identified previously. It's hard to know how much of the second-guessing is accurate. But there's a broad consensus about one early source of trouble. As a story in the Journal explained, the site initially required visitors to create accounts before shopping, because a tool to allow anonymous browsing wasn't ready on time. Establishing an account is among the more complicated tasks the website must perform—it requires sending information back and forth between multiple systems, all through secure channels. The result was a bottleneck.

In fairness, federal officials operated under tremendous political and logistical constraints, the kind few outsiders can grasp. Private developers don't have the same stringent standards for privacy and security, for instance. And given the enormous challenges of trying to integrate so many systems—some new, some old—nobody seriously expected the launch of Obamacare’s federal websites to take place without glitches. But few expected this many problems. And nobody seems quite sure when things will get better.