An unnecessary design choice = Waste of time and effort

I want to talk about a design choice I made early on while building my project and how that choice literally wasted 2 weeks of my time.

So just to set some context. I am working on my side project, Neutbook, which I use at my work to get unbiased feedback on ideas, and my teammates use it too to pitch different ideas. So, you could create a pitch that looks something like below and share a link to that pitch with anyone from whom you'd want feedback. That's it, simple.

The first version of the public page(on which you get feedback) looked like below.

1. The ideas/pitch is on the left
2. People could type in their feedback on the right, in the WYSIWYG editor

Now, the problem.

My design choice for allowing the user to type their feedback was something like a chat application. People would type in their feedback at the bottom and all the other feedback appeared on the top. If you had to look at older feedback you'd scroll up (how you'd on a chat application like slack). This was literally the worst decision. You would ask why?

1. I didn't really have the expertise to do it, so I researched a bit to implement it (3-4 days gone literally)
2. The WYSIWYG toolbar and the post feedback button just looked ugly
3. On some screens, the Post Feedback button would hide behind the footer (look at the screenshot)

Even the choice to add the fixed footer was bad. It just didn't add any value to the experience and worst yet came in the way of people giving feedback smoothly.

So I played around a bit trying to fix it using different CSS settings and arrived at the version below. Better but still lacked decency. It just did not respect the person trying to give feedback.

So, I thought. What is this design really doing? In order to give a sophisticated UX, I sacrificed simplicity.

And I did what I should have done in the first place. Rethought the whole screen and did the following:

1. Removed the footer (I was thinking that people may sign up to the app if the footer is placed which wasn't the case)
2. Took the feedback box all the way to the top, so there is literally no chance of all that ugly UX that was happening earlier

3. Went the extra mile and coded the feedback posting mechanism in a way that conditionally showed up the Post Feedback button and the WYSIWYG toolbar on the top only when someone typed in something in the box

I am super relieved and happy about the fixes I made. It is easy to maintain and most of all easy for people to type in their feedback.

Would love your 2 cents on the design choice I finally made.