I think this is a great insight. Just think of how many professional Java programmers are befuddled by classpath issues. Or Ruby programmers who can't figure out rvm. When I was first starting to learn C, it took me a while to figure out compiling vs linking, Makefiles, and why I had to -lm. BASIC was so much simpler with just load and run.

A lot of people are looking for a good teaching language, but really I suspect almost all languages are fine, and syntax is less important than an environment where you can jump right in without a lot of fuss.