Hey there.
I'm a fan of Emacs, like you folks.
I use Emacs org every day, mainly for my teaching class. Furthermore, I learn Emacs for three years ago.
But I struggle to achieve my learning of Elisp. For example, taping lisp and elisp code with evil/lispy is a true nightmare (I use Prelude with few modes, btw), not to mention when I type code block within org.
I knew the learning curve is hard. But I didn't expect that much frustration to learn it. The documentation is austere. So few examples are given. There is too little blogs or books about Emacs, specifically about org and babel.
To illustrate my point, let's take the «*this*» kind-of macro in babel, that I found TODAY by CHANCE in this page : https://orgmode.org/manual/Results-of-Evaluation.html.
It's a game changer for a lot of my code, and would deserve a whole page to illustrate it. But no, it's given in a «niche» example.
Don't be mistaken, I found Babel/Org/Emacs wonderful, but what a pain in the ass to learn it !
For such an old and wise piece of software, I can't understand why we don't have a smooth learning experience with Emacs. A lot of people could benefit Org/Emacs, without the big hinder of the «lack» of documentation (mostly examples).
Am I the only one to experience this ?
I’m eternally in debt with people who made Emacs possible. Emacs taught me how to think, show me the «literate programming» that I love so much. This is why I’m currently frustrating.
But, you are totally right. Thanks for this important reminder that we have such a great tool for free, and with such freedom.