Magento, the ecommerce system you learn to love... but it could take a while

At end of 2012 when Magento Live came to London I was speaking to a developer at one of the many social events that surround any Magento event (they are worth going to just for these events, but that is another story). He said something that really resonated with me, "The first year you use Magento you hate it. Then you realise the true power of it and you love it". He was talking from a system developers point of view but I think the same can be said for merchants as well and people who use the administration tools. So how much of this rings true with you? When I first encountered Magento around five years ago it was still relatively new and not well documented. A lot of my early experiences were very much down to trial and error. The Magento community was still in its infancy and much of the 'free' online content was aimed at developers, not merchants or administrators. So what were the problems? Well, the admin control panel doesn't look very user friendly at first glance; when you start looking at how to create products (and in particular configurable products) there are so many things you have to remember to do in a particular order, you would be forgiven for giving up after a few attempts; the 'language' itself of the whole admin system is written for developers rather than merchants and administrators for example, an attribute can be defined as an 'integer'...did you know that means a whole number? Terms like 'identifier' sneak in and there's inconsistencies with labelling. These inconsistencies simply increase the learning curve time. This is why I think you need to give yourself time to get used to the quirks of Magento; once you do, you can start to see through these minor limitations and start to realise the full potential. So what do you learn to love? For me it is the realisation that for most ecommerce stores built with Magento you can do some incredibly sophisticated things using a standard installation. Widgets have been a revelation to me, once I had learned about using widgets within the content of any page was when I realised just how flexible Magento is - and this is something you can learn to do without writing a line of code! Sure, Magento is a bit clunky in places, but once you are used to that you hardly notice it. What does Magento version 2 hold? is it going to improve on the usability side? Early screenshots* have shown me that there is not going to be a great leap on the usability front and for me some buttons are still in the wrong place, but I will reserve judgement until closer to the full release date. So if you are new to Magento my advice is power through and soon you will be realising the full potential of this great piece of software. *Thanks to MageUpdate.com for the Magento 2 Screenshots