Okay, I won't lie, this is a bit of a side-swipe but...
... it sounds like you kind of wanted emacs. One of the most impressive things I find about emacs (especially since semi-proper packages became a thing) is just how easy it is to get stuff that is 5-10-15 years old working on it. No word of a lie, it's amazing how they've managed to break so little over the years.
No I appreciate the tip and have often considered diving into Emacs or Vim. Im very fond of the Scite and Lua combo as well now, and i would like to have the time to share and develop it more than to set up on a new system - but yes those other systems do look good...
Yep. It's good to have both - the car is the first of a list, and the cdr is the rest, but a cons isn't always a list. Having first and rest exclusively would be short-changing us conceptually.
It's also easy if you live in Germany or a German speaking surrounding. Being immersed into a German speaking surrounding helps - learning without other Germans from training material is less motivating, so it looks difficult. What actually the difficult part is, is the motivation, not the language. For somebody from an English speaking country learning German is not really difficult - English has lots of Germanic roots. It's just that many people in English-speaking countries don't learn any foreign language to a competent level, not even the easier ones, so everything looks difficult. What really would be a bit more 'difficult' is language with a different alphabet (Russian) or a language which is different on many levels (Japanese).
It also depends on what level you want to be able to read German. If you want to be able to read philosophers (Kant, Schopenhauer, Hegel, Jaspers, Habermas, ...) then the subject is also difficult - it would help if you understand/know the concepts already - they are often independent of the language.
English is also difficult. Parts of the language are easy, but the language is huge. I can read many english texts quite fluently, but there are novels where I am at 10% reading speed (compared to english texts from typical news sources) when I want to understand 95% of the words.
I think getting to a decent understanding of German should not be too hard, but some nuances are. Even some native speakers struggle with parts of the grammar, like dass/das, dativ/genetiv, etc. I am a native German speaker who learned English as his second language and is now learning Greek, including a different alphabet, as his third.
Literacy for example seems to be quite good in some countries with languages which for me would look difficult. The UK OTOH is not happy with their results.
I've never had serious musical training, but I've spent a lot of time picking tunes with old folkies. A lot of those guys are absolutely the same when it comes to this sort of creativity, and I picked up a lot of advice that I like to think has stuck with me ever since. I remember I was nervous as hell when I'd just started heading along to jams - here was me, having learned a bit about scales and a few chords, yet wondering how I could ever contribute to the wonderful sounds this group was creating. It was an old gentleman in his 70s who just turned around, saw me sat there overwhelmed, trying to figure out what was going on, and said "We've got seven notes in a scale, and most of these tunes'll barely use half of 'em!".
Music, at its heart, is the ultimate in making do with what you have - I just think that folkies are more likely to admit it!
... it sounds like you kind of wanted emacs. One of the most impressive things I find about emacs (especially since semi-proper packages became a thing) is just how easy it is to get stuff that is 5-10-15 years old working on it. No word of a lie, it's amazing how they've managed to break so little over the years.