They have, just like Ubuntu and others. I think that post is referring to things that have typically been seen as problems, not necessarily things that are still big problems.

I used Yast in 2000, and generally had a good experience with Suse. The distro won out for me, as I could configure Yast through an ncurses interface. You had to surrender some control to Yast, which was both a blessing and a curse.

An issue is one of consistency across the distributions - which is partly the nature of the beast of Linux. And that's why I recommend a distro with a large community to a newcomer.

That's not to say that the underlying tools aren't there, it's just the GUI tool chains are missing or could be better and more consistent.