I'm pretty sure you are not alone in your frustration. Every user who comes to a site, will to some extent be frustrated to be held back from fully participating on it like other users can. And especially within a network of sites as large as SO/SE, the varying level of privileges can be quite surprising or frustrating.
Some of the privileges I have on SO, I don't have on the Programmers SE and here on Meta I have more abilities than on SO. So from time to time I feel that I'm missing something on other sites. Especially when I have to flag something that I would normally just vote to close. Or when I make an edit on a site completely new to me and see that it goes into some review queue.
So no, you're not alone.
That said, I don't think it's all that much of a bad thing. The commenting and voting thresholds are not all that high. And with the association bonus kicking in on all sites once you reach 200 rep on a single site, most of the initial pain is quite easily relieved. In my opinion it's a neat feature.
And keep in mind that different sites are different. I might be considered a reasonable SO users, but that does no imply that I would participate equally well on a site as fundamentally different as the Skeptics SE. In that sense it's not all that bad that I'm (in my perception) put several steps down the ladder again, to prove myself on that particular site.
Boundaries like the ones you experience have been discussed time and time again. A rep limit for commenting is in place to keep the noise/spam down. And a rep limit for voting requires users to at least get some grasp on the site and how it works, before deciding that content is either good or bad. In addition to that it helps prevent vote fraud which would trivial by creating a new account that can vote without any prior participation.
How effective or necessary some of these boundaries are, I don't know. But I'm certainly not willing to find out by removing them altogether.
That said, participate on your site of choice for a while and you'll easily get your 200 rep and the bonus that comes with that, lifting most of the basic limitations for you on all sites.