I think a big issue is where the average programmer begins his journey. If you start with visual studio and all you have to do is click “build” or “run” and all the magic occurs in the back, of course you’ll be lost later on. If you start with C and have to write Makefiles or compile simple programs on the command line, you’ll learn much more and probably won’t run into this later. It’s tough to understand what’s going on when so much is happening behind the scenes.