Ethereum is a decentralized network. The "right way" to perform transactions in the network is for you to connect to the network directly and to submit your own transactions directly. This would require you to run a wallet or node that connects directly to the network. This would take longer for you to set up and you'd have to download (at least part of) the blockchain, maintain it, maintain peers, etc etc.
MyEtherWallet, a 100% free and 100% open source project. They are nice enough to do all this work for your convenience. They run their own nodes, synchronize the blockchain, and push your transactions to the blockchain for you free of charge, and that's on top of them providing all the beautiful wallet generation tools for free too.
So instead of moaning on about how awful MEW is because your ICO purchase didn't go through... first realize that:
- You're complaining about a free service that thousands of people are trying to use at once. Unless you're going to donate 100 ETH to them to cover their server costs then your complaints are impractical.
- You're complaining about something without understanding how it works, and you don't even realize you're also doing it wrong to begin with. If you want a 100% reliable wallet 24/7 then you have to go set one up and maintain it yourself. So quit complaining about the people nice enough to let you use their node at their expense for free because you are too lazy to set up a proper wallet/node yourself.
- The status.im contribution page listed five different ways you can contribute. Three of these ways connect directly to the network and they even provided video tutorials on how to use them. These would've solved your problems today. You quite literally tried spending hundreds or thousands of dollars on something without reading the instructions, and then when things went wrong you decided to blame the good guys at MEW, who are the only party in this equation not making money from the ICO, by the way.
Credit and thanks to /u/dont_forget_canada from reddit for the post on /r/ethtrader