facetime stuck on login spinner

I have been a MS Windows user for many years and this week made the jump to Apple. Should have stayed with my old faithful Acer! I was told High Sierra can join a windows domain - well sort of. It was easy to add my new Mac Air to both my home domain controller and 802.1x authentication over wifi. The problem is that since the Wifi NIC does not come active until the user logs in - domain authentication can't work at all. Why would Apple add support for domain controllers and not start the wifi NIC at bootup? This makes no sense at all!

The other head banging issue I have is that both Facetime and iMessage are totally unusable. From the hours and hours of googling I have done - it seems that this is a very wide spread issue. None! None! None! of the solutions I have tried - updating DNS, set firewall off, set the time and location service on and off, clearing key-rings, new apple ID's, factory reset, etc, etc, etc etc work at all. This service is just too flaky to work - period!

My question is - For the past 10 years all I have heard from Apple users is how stable iOS is over MS Windows. Why would anyone think this?

Just about ready to send this thing back and stick with MS Win 10!