Hi Kati,
I would love to answer this question!
First off, I want to acknowledge that the pain our dev community faces is real. Even though our product offerings and documentation have gotten much better over the past couple of years, the way that we present it to the world is... not optimal.
Compared to Stripe, we have a very broad spectrum of payment solutions. This is great, because we can solve pretty much any scenario related to moving money and collecting payments, but it can get overwhelming for somebody who is going to integrate with PayPal for the first time.
Now, to the important question: What are we doing about it?
As of two months ago, a new internal organization was formed at PayPal: The Merchant Integration Platform.
We have a single mission: To ensure that merchants/developers are able to find the right product for their needs (with adequate documentation, tutorials and examples), can easily integrate/test against our sandbox environment, and have a smooth move to production.
I've been at PayPal for nearly seven years (Fun fact: My first role was tech support!), and for the first time, a team has complete end-to-end ownership of the developer experience, as well as a single-purpose charter.
As the leader of this org, my only responsibility is to make sure that your integration experience is the best in the world.
We're taking multiple steps to make sure that everyone's needs are met. We'll be revising our content strategy, to make sure we deliver the right information to the right audience (As opposed to throwing the kitchen sink at you), we'll be updating our developer portal, and we'll be making our sandbox more robust. Also, I'm very excited to be restarting our developer outreach program!
(Shameless plug: If you're reading this, and you think it's an interesting problem to solve, I would love to hire you! jobsearch.paypal-corp.com/en-US/job/developer-rel… )
For anyone who would like to learn more, please reach out to me directly @LennyMarkus