Blender is an incredible achievement for the open source community. It is an extraordinarily capable bit of software and 2.80 brings so many huge changes and refinements.
While it still remains a complex bit of software it is not has difficult as its reputation would suggest and 2.80 makes a lot of concessions to making the UI more familiar to newbies.
For anyone wanting to jump in now, here's a good guide for making your first model in Blender 2.8, even if you have never made a model before: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jBqYTgaFDxU
I credit Ton Roosendaal for his direction of the project. Since I first started following the project, there have been two large refactors. Both which have driven significant improvements.
A lot of the 'difficult' reputation lingers from the pre-2.5 days when the UI was quite different from anything most users had ever seen before. The 2.5, and now 2.8, UI reworking has gone a long way to remove this barrier for many users.
While it still remains a complex bit of software it is not has difficult as its reputation would suggest and 2.80 makes a lot of concessions to making the UI more familiar to newbies.