alt Hacker NewsHotel sites are dramatically worse IMO. Airlines have mostly made things mostly understandable.
Now, if you're buying from consolidators on their consistently-shady-looking sites, which will contact you later with your ticket if they got it at all: oh yeah those are sometimes total insanity.
I'm not familiar with shady sites, but probably >75% of my previous 50 trips were booked through Kayak or similar sites. They make it painless to group everything you need for where you are going, and if there is any problem, like a flight delay, etc., since it was booked all together, they just adjust the future bookings/book other flights as necessary to make sure your trip is smooth riding. Any time I need more than just one resource (car, hotel, flight), I use a consolidator because if they aren't bundled, no one lifts a finger to help you when anything out of your control happens, but they bend over backwards to help if you used a booking site.