I think all these tutorials and showcases showing CLI usage for plaintext accounting kinda miss the mark and ultimately hinders adoption. 99% of the times I interact with ledger is with the same 4 commands. The fact I have the ledger file open in emacs and use these commands from a keybind is what makes the experience great. Trust me, if you need to run some complicated analysis, (h)ledger has your back and you can find how to do it in the docs. Most of the time you don't so just go and start bookkeeping. You need your file populated to see any benefit, and they'll become obvious when you get there.