Thanks for sharing your experience. This really highlights the difficulty that exists for people to buy in to Steem/SP. I am glad you were able to figure it out.

I was lucky enough to have my brother who was a 'bitcoin expert' to guide me through it. He had me signup for coinbase, and I've been using it for many years. Its as easy as paypal / online banking in my opinion, but the downside is you have to share quite a bit of personal information (bank account # included) to use it.

As far as using Poloniex/Bittrex to exchange BTC for STEEM and SBD + transfer in and out of Steemit, thankfully others had published fairly straightforward 'how to' guides, where I pretty much just followed the instructions.