I really can't relate to the language being hard to learn. I've been using jq for a while now and have only had to look at the docs once when a key contained special characters and dot notation didn't work. I've usually been able to just guess the syntax in a couple of tries, but that might be because I'm just used to using weird notation for manipulating data structures (css, emmet, xpath, various "functional" globs of map/filter/reduce/zip...)