Did you ever work through the tutorial on the iPad? I don’t ask that to be impertinent. I found going through that helped me to understand the interface a lot better and to get around more efficiently.
Like a few others have posted here, I like and use the iPad (and iPhone app). I will be the first to admit that I’d love it to have as close to feature parity as possible with its desktop sibling. The absence of that feature parity has not resulted in the iPad app being non-functional, messy, confusing, or useless. I wrote an entire article for publication in an uber using Scrivener on my iPhone.
Here is my tip, find an aspect of your writing that you can do on your iPad. Just use that subset on your iPad. Then when ideas pop into your mind of things that you’d like to do, but can’t on your ipad, make a note in the inspector or with a comment. Then when you are editing the project on your desktop, you can attend to those things.
I know that it’s frustrating that iPad Scrivener is not exactly equal to desktop Scrivener. But it’s still a capable app. If you are willing to try some more, give it some time.
Hopefully, the chorus of iPad users will convince @KB that if he gives us even more power, we promise to use it to the full. (But maybe it’s the OS designers who we need to convince and not KB.)
By the way, I wrote my manifesto of my iPadOS wishlist back in 2022. Here it is for your reading pleasure:
I use my Apple Pencil a lot in iPad Scrivener for navigation, highlighting, and the like. Are you saying that you use the Apple Pencil for actual writing – i.e., using Scribble or something? Can you explain more, because I’d be delighted to use mine for actual composing. I just haven’t gotten that great at Scribble (assuming that’s the feature that you are using for editing) for longer compositions.