Sorry to hear about your poor experiences with our expired auctions. Always open to and thankful for constructive feedback.
To address the last minute renewal issue above - we are planning to introduce proxy bidding into our expired auctions in the near future. Through this, we will be able to resolve auction bids quickly at the end of the auction, reducing the window for current registrants to renew their domains last minute.
With regards to the pre-funding requirement for expired auctions, that's a little trickier unfortunately. The last thing we want to do is make it more difficult for you guys to use our platform, but we also have to take into potential abuses of the system. Without the pre-funding requirement, we used to encounter major delays in awarding the domain post auction because users would either post fake bids or attach invalid payment methods. These delays were leading to cases where we have to go through numerous bidders to find a legitimate one or running out of time to renew the domain before the grace period expired.