It was worth it all the trouble? oh yes! :-)
Does Emacs have a reputation of being difficult to use? I remember that in the late 70s and early 80s MIT's CS and AI labs were proud that the (not specifically trained) secretaries used Emacs and wrote macros for it.
It's been decades since I was a novice user so I don't remember the experience, but was the first editor I'd ever used, and, years later, the first editor my (arts major) wife ever used, and I don't remember any particular anxieties or consternation from either of us.
Yes. And as it usually goes, it's an undeserved reputation caused by it being different from what most people are used to.
Emacs was just more dificult than the other programs that I tried, and I tried a lot: word, antiword, abiword, starwriter, openoffice, ed, joe, elvis, nano, vim, xemacs... okay I will bang my fingers and head against emacs and see what happens
I realized later that I was doing it all wrong when I started to slowly unfurl the capabilities of the program. Couldn't be great if...? and, suddenly a wild major-mode appears. Not more viruses hiding around, not more big files that decide to crash or lose their format five hours before a presentation. Not more I updated the program and now I can't open my old files anymore.
Very well time spent in retrospective. I use it every day. Same for LaTeX that was much more dificult to grasp but even more rewarding in a lot of unexpected ways.