sometimes is says it can't find any accounts, but if you retry a few times, eventually it does.

I'm not 100% certain but I think it's the nodes being overloaded and not returning proper responses. That's why when you try different urls in the Networks settings it can lead to better results because those nodes end up being available.

I heard the plan was to improve the eosportal website to allow more intelligently pull the right network url automatically.

Not sure, but another better solution might potentially be if the block producers can provide a load balanced endpoint that has only one url but many different nodes behind it and then routes to the least used one. But I don't really know the details here to be honest, just some educated guesses on my side.

It says "Loading token balances", then says I have 10 EOS tokens. I should have a lot more tokens than that, and I've got no idea why it's saying 10, but it's a worry.

Yea, it shows only 10 EOS for me as well. That's exactly the amount that I have left unstaked in my account which I think was some default setting from the current initial chain state. You can see that on https://eosflare.io

The setting in Scatter to show the balance is very new and experimental and I guess it only shows the unstaked amount so far.