I started working with Django last week. The documentation is complete, organized, and located in one indexed portion of the website. You can download a PDF of the entire thing and it’s better than any O’Reilly book you could possibly buy about Django. If you land on a page for an old version of the framework, it lets you know.
The same thing goes for Postgres.
The same thing goes for Symfony.
The same thing goes for Rails.
The same thing goes for React.
These are tools that want to be used. It’s obvious from the onboarding tutorials in each of these that they want to make the process easy for noobs.
Contrast this with Drupal. I had been poking at and trying to figure out Drupal for almost a year (getting actual work done with Wordpress in the meantime) before I picked up a book that finally cleared it up for me. Oh! Drupal isn’t supposed to do anything! You have to go module shopping to make it do simple things! And you have to go buy a book to tell you that!
And the situation has only gotten worse now that Acquia has decided to throw away over a decade of community knowledge about how to build Drupal sites. Where’s the simple onboarding tutorial in here (?), because i can’t find it.
I’m not saying that Drupal 8 is going to fail - god knows it is a ginormous step forward in SO many ways - but if it does it’ll be because the Drupal project takes building things far more seriously than it does anything else, especially teaching others how to use those things. The smartest thing that Acquia could do at this point for the future of Drupal would be to put a complete moratorium on any new features until the currently existing features are covered with this level of official documentation.