Agreed. Even with a comprehensive Read Me there will be issues that people wont be able to overcome due to lack of experience...mismatched library versions, compiler versions, OS, etc.
Why is it good to shelter people from learning experiences? Forums, documentation, Q&A sites, IRC, Google, etc are all excellent resources for n00bs.
When I was a complete and utter beginner I relied on all the above methods for support when I encountered seemingly insurmountable problems, and as a consequence I learned a lot and quickly. This was one of the best things that ever happened to me.
You say shelter, someone else says complete waste of time. I am actually for people building their own but if you don't recognize that some problems at some instances of dev are simply over complicated winding hacks that will not ever be used again... well. That just turns to the 'Holier than Thou' moments that look over pedantic to people that, while not lacking coding skills, will just be put off when contacting with this reality.
And the n00bs, l33t talk, not so much.
In addition to the other response, most of these are terrible resources for people trying to learn.
Forums: "omfg search u fucken noob!!"
Documentation: Haha, what documentation?
Q&A sites: Find 1000 threads with no replies all asking your same question. Find 1 thread with your question, and then a reply - which says "Never mind, I figured it out."
IRC: "omfg rtfm!" - as a best case scenario. More likely, -- leeter sets mode +b noob@noobisp.net / -- noob has been kicked by leeter (learn to rtfm)
Google: See Q&A site
Mailing lists might work as a resource. Reading the code might work. And sure, you might have some success with these methods, but pretending like you can just send someone trying to learn a piece of software into any of those places and expect them to get answers easily is laughably naive.
Perhaps I'm lucky, but I've never had any of the experiences you've described. The worst that's happened to me is having a question closed on one of the Stack Exchange sites.
I also did forget to mention mailing lists; I knew I was missing something.
I have occasionally had them. If you're doing something relatively common, like trying to compile a popular project on a popular platform, you can get answers pretty reliably.
However, if you're doing something really uncommon, or your problem is unusual in some way, there may be no remedy beyond building the required technical knowledge to solve it yourself. Sometimes that's years beyond you.
Compilations with lots of flags are a great example of that. If your particular system needs a flag that isn't there, Google isn't much help. And if you don't know what those flags do, you may not be able to learn enough to solve your problem in a reasonable amount of time.
