>What were you doing during the initial semi-helpless "why-does-this-hurt-so-much" phase of your emacs journey?
I just looked at it as something to have fun with honestly. When I got stuck with something I just put it down for another time and I kept in mind that it's going to take a long time. And because I intentionally avoided copying things I didn't understand there honestly weren't that many moments of being super clueless. Also reminding myself that it was basically twice as old as I was at the time helped because you just can't expect to grok it immediately.
"More powerful"?
I find that people who take a slower long-term approach tend to be the ones that have a good experience. The moment someone really "needs" to get something done with emacs is usually when they shelve it for something more intuitive or more powerful out of the box.