I personally had this experience when first wanting to learn spark, and it really turned me off to the whole spark ecosystem. Curious if you have any suggested resources that do a good job on this?
Scala & PySpark are both great options. Lots of devs are terrified of Scala, so PySpark is more popular now. I'd say Scala has a slight technical advantage, see here for more details: https://mungingdata.com/apache-spark/python-pyspark-scala-wh.... Both are great overall.
I wrote a book that's a practical introduction to Spark: https://leanpub.com/beautiful-spark/
Most of the training materials are theoretical, which makes Spark seem really intimidating. You can learn some basic Spark principles and get up-and-running with production workflows quickly.