Bitcoin has come a long way.
Yesterday I made my first payment using bitpay and electrum. It was surprisingly easy.
Easy enough for any normal non-technical person to be able to do the same.
The only drawback was that the fee was automatically set to be quite high: 72 sat/byte, when 10 say/byte would have confirmed in approximately one hour. And still it took more than 30min to confirm.
And the remaining
BTC in my address are still worth more than what I paid for them. Even though I have used parts of them several times already.
when you go with default fee, it will set a average fee like you said 72 sat/byte. you can either stick with that or change it to custom fee and set a fee of your own choice. as you said it took 30 min to confirm. if you've set lower fee then it would take longer and higher fee would take lesser time to confirm the transactions.
with electrum you can do that fee adjustment very well. I don't know about Bitpay tho..
BTW. congrats on your first Bitcoin Payment.