I agree that elisp, itself, is quite easy to learn. I wish I could say the same about the emacs API. M-x apropos is somewhat useful, but quite a lot of my editor customizations come down to either 1) reading the source of the functionality that I'm trying to customize and reading what variables it accesses or 2) random Googling to see what others have customized.

That said, to emacs' credit, it makes (1) extraordinarily easy. C-h k to see which function is being called by a given key-combination and C-h f to get to the source of that function makes it very easy to look at the internals of the editor and figure what I should setq in order to make the editor behave in the way I want.