I'm not telling people they're using it wrongly, I'm saying that Mastodon has benefits that they may not (yet) have realised, and that it's not Twitter. This is why I say that using both is a perfectly reasonable option.
And Mastodon is not Twitter. Twitter does have some advantages over Mastodon, and if that's what you want or need, then great.
But if you want a quality audience, Mastodon might be a reasonable alternative, and criticising it for not being the same as Twitter, or using the same metrics that you use for Twitter, is misguided.
I'm not good at analogies - never have been - but let me try one. If someone tells me that their experience of using my car sucks and I point out that it's a stick-shift and not an automatic, that's not my failure to understand them, that's me providing information to try to help them get the most out of an alternative experience.
Choosing an instance that matches your interests is part of the federated/non-centralised experience. It's different, and for some, like me, there is value in that difference.