When I was finally told how the US government worked, I couldn't believe my ears. It was a mess. An arbitrary, clunky monstrosity full of loopholes a child could abuse. I could think of a dozen improvements off the top of my head.

For what it's worth, the Founding Fathers actually did do quite a bit of research into what kinds of "loopholes" had existed in earlier systems, particularly the one in England, and took steps to avoid them. For example, the Constitution mandates that a census be taken every ten years because, in England, there were "rotten boroughs" which had a member of Parliament even though they had a tiny population. Needless to say, it wasn't easy to get politicians in these districts to approve redistricting laws.

On the other hand, the Founding Fathers didn't anticipate gerrymandering, though.

To give you an idea of how my teenaged mind worked, it was immediately clear to me that any first-order "improvements" suggested by naïve ninth-graders would have unintended negative consequences. Therefore, improvement number one involved redesigning the system to make it easy to test many different improvements in parallel, adding machinery to adopt the improvements that were actually shown to work.

In theory, the state governments were supposed to serve as a way to test improvements in parallel. I don't know if it ever worked out that way, though.

There certainly are problems with the U.S. Constitution as it stands (there's no reason for the Electoral College, and the U.S. Senate re-implements rotten boroughs because the largest state has 65 times the population of the smallest one) but it's worked tolerably well for over 200 years now.