But if we're talking about design issues, there is one big one that everyone seems to be missing - and that is the Proof of Work incentive mechanism. The first issue with this is that it disproportionately rewards early adopters (both via difficulty increasing every 2 weeks and rewards halving every 4 years) and requires a constant addition of new adopters just to sustain the price (to counteract the deflationary nature of new coin generation), which makes it appear more like a traditional pyramid scheme than a new financial paradigm and may in the long term behave like one. The second issue is that this has led to the concentration of almost all of the wealth in a handful of anonymous and in many cases very shady characters in a completely unregulated market which has completely inverted the original goals of the project. The third issue is of course that Proof of Work is an environmental disaster.
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Agree with other comments that these are more coding issues, that aren't uncommon in pre-beta versions of software.
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You misconstrue the algorithm, difficulty only increases when hash power increases to maintain a 10 min blocktime. Difficulty can decrease too.
Well, what you call here "design issues" I would call "flaws of an imperfect solution". They are design issues similar to how CAP theorem is a "design issue" with dbms-s or how concentration of wealth is a "design issue" of capitalism.
His system solves a previously unsolved problem, but it has flaws. Do we know a better solution? Well, it's being worked on. However, Bitcoin has been here for ~10 years.