Most people who quit editing software early do not quit because the tool is too hard. They quit because they opened a professional-grade application expecting it to behave like a consumer app, and it did not.
Premiere Pro and DaVinci Resolve are built around a specific mental model: the timeline as a physical cutting table. If nobody explained that to you upfront, the interface looks like a cockpit with no manual. Every panel, every shortcut assumes you already think in cuts, sequences, and tracks.
The software is not hiding its logic from you. It just assumes you already speak the language.
When I first sat down with DaVinci, I spent 40 minutes trying to figure out why my imported footage looked washed out. The answer was a colour space mismatch, something a working colorist catches in 30 seconds. Nobody mentions this in beginner tutorials because it feels like a footnote to professionals.
The gap between your first attempt and actual competence is almost always about mental models, not mouse clicks. Once you understand that the software is modelling a physical workflow, things start to click without memorising a single shortcut.