Learning Emacs is a very interactive process (much as Emacs itself). It's best to introduce new extensions one by one as you need them, and spending some time using them.
I consider myself a noob Emacs user (having been using it exclusively for the last 4+ years), and here's a trick I use if I feel overwhelmed/annoyed by some extension: I decide to spend 30-60 minutes (to the clock; personally I measure it in pomodoros) practicing the mode itself. Such focused learning gives wonderful results. For instance, I spent 30 minutes on learning multiple-cursors.el and now I can't imagine living without it. Or I was always confused by Paredit, but it took about one hour of practicing it to become proficient in it. Again, I now can't imagine working in Lisp without Paredit.
Discovering interesting modes can be a task in itself; I suggest browsing through at least Emacs Rocks short videos[0], they introduce many a handy utility.
@melpa_emacs twitter feed automatically lets you know packages that are under development. That doesn't mean they're any good LOL, but it does mean they're definitely not abandoned.
meta x package-list-packages or something like that and scroll thru 3000 or so packages. I used to do that with Debian in the 90s or so when there were only a couple thousand packages, to see whats new.
HELM input method addon for emacs is interesting. So you hit alt-x and type pac (spacebar) lis and it searches the command list for the regex pac (logical AND) lis and returns the set of scrollable results. Its why I don't remember if the command is packages-list-packages or elpa-list-package-list or whatever, no cognitive need anymore, you want a list of packages you type some of the word package, spacebar and some of the word list, and its right there, ready for up and down arrow and hit enter. And HELM is applied to pretty much everything in emacs, running commands, switching buffers, opening files, projectile addon stuff... pretty awesome. I think it took me about a month to completely break my decades old tab completion habit when opening files LOL.
Just scrollin about the emacswiki finds some interesting addons.
Finally if you install a pre-pack of 50 addons and init file, you'll be blown away, but they can be a nice map or todo list. I think that was how I discovered perspective addon, I'd seen it and shrugged shoulders, but everyone likes it in the lists of pre-packs so I gave it a try, and I really liked it after trying.
AFAIK there is no "emacs addon of the week" twitter feed or podcast or screencast. This would be an interesting microstartup for some bored new emacs user. "Lets play" screencast video series on youtube featuring exactly one emacs extension per episode sounds fun.
Learning Emacs is a very interactive process (much as Emacs itself). It's best to introduce new extensions one by one as you need them, and spending some time using them.
I consider myself a noob Emacs user (having been using it exclusively for the last 4+ years), and here's a trick I use if I feel overwhelmed/annoyed by some extension: I decide to spend 30-60 minutes (to the clock; personally I measure it in pomodoros) practicing the mode itself. Such focused learning gives wonderful results. For instance, I spent 30 minutes on learning multiple-cursors.el and now I can't imagine living without it. Or I was always confused by Paredit, but it took about one hour of practicing it to become proficient in it. Again, I now can't imagine working in Lisp without Paredit.
Discovering interesting modes can be a task in itself; I suggest browsing through at least Emacs Rocks short videos[0], they introduce many a handy utility.
[0] - http://emacsrocks.com/