I learned SAS in college and 15 years later I'm still using it, so it's become pretty natural to me. It's not particularly fun to learn, though, I agree. The lack of a modern editor kind of sucks too. You're not going to get hints, code completion and linting. You do get a feel for the madness when you work on a mainframe implementation, though - all of a sudden, the PROC syntax starts to make sense. I'm not going to lie, though, I do most/all data manipulation and ETL ops in PROC SQL. The only time I touch the DATA step is when I need to loop. It does have really good Teradata integration, though, and that's really important for most of my use cases.

That said, the one language that's gotten me away from SAS is Python. It's nice to have a general purpose language with so much community support, packages, etc. And I don't need to call an account rep if I need to extend functionality. Budgets aside, SAS is seriously messy when it comes to its modules.