I'm also a hobbyist. It's daunting, but there are a lot of good videos on Youtube.
I think the most frustrating thing is just trying to find the correct symbol and footprint for the part you want. Sometimes they're hard to find because you have to understand Kicad's organization scheme. Sometimes what you want isn't there at all so you have to make your own symbol or footprint or both. (Which, to be fair, is reasonably easy to do.)
Exporting a Kicad project's gerbers and drill files to JLPCB is surprisingly easy, but to use their pick and place service is more work. (I just ordered an assembled board for the first time, and had to manually reposition all the parts in their web interface because the position file put all the parts offset way off to one side and with the wrong rotation. Not sure if I did something wrong or there's just a bug.)
I think Kicad just takes a long time to learn. There are a lot of very powerful features that you might not know about at first. Kicad also expects you to do things in a particular way, and if you don't it tends to cause problems.
I think the most frustrating thing is just trying to find the correct symbol and footprint for the part you want. Sometimes they're hard to find because you have to understand Kicad's organization scheme. Sometimes what you want isn't there at all so you have to make your own symbol or footprint or both. (Which, to be fair, is reasonably easy to do.)
Exporting a Kicad project's gerbers and drill files to JLPCB is surprisingly easy, but to use their pick and place service is more work. (I just ordered an assembled board for the first time, and had to manually reposition all the parts in their web interface because the position file put all the parts offset way off to one side and with the wrong rotation. Not sure if I did something wrong or there's just a bug.)
I think Kicad just takes a long time to learn. There are a lot of very powerful features that you might not know about at first. Kicad also expects you to do things in a particular way, and if you don't it tends to cause problems.
Kicad 7 is out now, but I haven't tried it yet.