@ Trihexagonal
When i'm trying to resolve a bsd issue outside of its forums, most likely by googling an answer, then I'm most likely to come across people who have tried and failed & who thus have negative reactions to their failure. These people are probably not core users otherwise they would be using the forums, but they probably could be if they thought the systems were more accessible.
That has been my experience & that finding is not necessarily to be assumed to be the result of a personal confirmation bias. In fact I expect the reasons would be naturally infinite. One would have to do serious research to find out accurately which distributions/operating systems are in fact easy or hard to use, and in fact that has been surely done informally by people over the years including many who have had to find out the hard way. What can be defined as hard or easy is of course another question.
I get the impression that developers tend try to make their distributions/operating systems more palatable to users by using a smattering of graphics as an attraction but without losing their linux/unix identity, As such Unix in particular, still seems to come across as a system really only accessible to sophisticated /business users & there is no real attempt (or need) to market it to be accessible to the masses.
My perception has always been that with linux & unix one needs to go into the process very much with his/her eyes open, as they tend to be code intensive. The problem is exacerbated in that many people coming from the windows operating system environment have been hand fed with intuitive graphics systems.
I also expect that for more than a few business organisations training all there staff to use unix would be at a prohibitive cost because its tendency to be code intensive in nature compared with the Windows system, & because many people are not geeky and find working with code an arduous chore. These are people who just want results & don't want to have their head under the hood all the time to make those results possible.
At the end of the day it's horses for courses. It depends how one is wired & motivated. I'm sure most people of an artistic nature would not be comfortable working with algorithms. The easy implied answer would be 'why don't you just go away & collect stamps_this is not for you'.
i have found the BSD forums here very friendly, much more so than some other forums, but it would be nice if the small few who want to make new users life miserable with high handed & sometimes negative responses gave it a rest. & they should be careful not to stereotype us as not having read the manual/handbook.
I commend you for producing the Beginner's guide. Thank you for your thoughts.