> but how did the author learned to love, and more importantly to "fear" the RH? What's there to fear?

It's made abundantly clear: they learned to love it through the course they were fortunate enough to take as an undergraduate, and they learned to fear it later, as a researcher, when they realised that what there was to fear was wasting their career attacking something that was probably just too big and too hard to be sensible for them to attack.