I'm a professional software developer (well, "professional"; I have a part time programmming job next to studies), where I program in C++, compiling with GCC. I have never read GCC's manual. Expecting newcomers to read the 18 thousand lines of man page before trying to make a program isn't reasonable.

Of course, the man page is a great resource for looking things up, but I can't imagine many people sit down with GCC's man page and actually read it through.