Yes, I fully agree. The basics and primitives are very simple and easy, but actually using those to make useful packages is far harder than it might seem at first glance.

Goroutines and channels are not bad at all, but I feel there's some part missing to use them effectively without too much headaches. I've often found sync.WaitGroup and mutexes far more useful than channels.

Actually, I wrote an entire article about this, discussed here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26220693