I think the problem with direct voting on issues is that, in general issues are complicated and nobody (politicians neither) has the time to familiarise themselves with every topic. This makes direct voting be easily influenced by lobbying towards extreme positions, because those offer "easy" answers when nuance is required.

I'm actually in agreement with the OP. An interesting concept in this direction are citizen Councils or assemblies [1]. Essentially a group of random citizens get selected to investigate an (typical local) issue. They are given all the necessary administrative resources and are supposed to come up with a solution/recommendation.

They have been tried on a local level in Australia. In the documentary I saw about this, they said that people generally become engaged in the process and try to understand the nuance and different view points of the issue. Even people coming into the process with more extreme view points adopt more nuance.

[1] https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2023/feb/01/citizens-ass...