It's just one anecdote, but this jibes with my personal experience. I hated algebra (high school algebra) because it was endless tedious, mechanical manipulations and there didn't seem to be any real elegance or beauty to it. It was just memorizing "stuff" like the quadratic formula, how to rationalize denominators, blah, blah, blah. But high-school geometry was actually interesting. Seeing how the various proofs were formed and built up from pieces, and how one thing followed logically from another, that was fun.

Needless to say, my geometry grade was much better than my algebra grade.

Then, in college, taking pre-calc/Trig, it was back to a lot of boring repetition (except trig, that was actually interesting). But then in Calc I, it was fun again. The idea behind derivatives was actually interesting, and hooked me early on in Calc I.

Anyway, I always found that, other than tedium, the biggest challenge I had with math was being put off by cryptic notation. I tend to want to read things to myself in my head as I look at them on a page, and when I'm looking at (new/unfamiliar) math notation, and I don't know how to "pronounce" it to myself, my mind wants to just blank out and skip it.