> It's meant to be a little snarky - from a macro level everything looks simple if you just segment it into ten steps. The problem is that each steps contains many many details and years of experience and hard work that can't even be verbalized properly.
What part of the tutorials did you find hard to follow?
Yes it's hard to verbalize the "why?"'s of the choices made in the tutorial, but that's why you just have to plonk down with Inkscape and recreate what's in the tutorial. That's not too hard, is it? To manipulate the spheres and boxes so they appear like in the tutorials, a programmer isn't daunted by an unknown GUI, are they?
The only way to learn it is by experience, actually doing the exercises. You can't explain the "why?" beforehand, but as you simply follow the steps, you will encounter the same states/stages as the original artist/author did, and the choices they made will become obvious only after you experienced them from that point of view. (you can't use words to teach that kind of understanding)
FTR, I did do a number of the tutorials a while back already. But then, I already knew how to draw. Except on paper and in raster-based image editors. Working with vectors in Inkscape was a new and very fun experience. Plus it turns out to be super-useful for taking PDFs apart!
Also the workflow from the tuts was something I might not have trivially figured out myself: Find an existing object whose shape has the qualities you need (or a circle or box if needed), duplicate it, tweak it, get to know the deformation effects, set operations, etc, whatever you have to do to have to tweak as little actual vector nodes as possible. But to do this, you need a type of 2D spatial insight, and you can only train and practice it, nobody can explain it until you got your hands dirty a bit.
But a programmer should be able to do that. It is however a terribly frightening step for a programmer to take: "Okay, I'm doing this, but I don't know WHY ..."
I totally get that, I feel the same way and hate it when a coding tutorial does it. But for drawing it's different, it's more like those "VIM kata's" that were posted a while back on HN. Ok they too explained the "why?", but the main intent was to train that muscle memory. And fortunately it turns out you don't even need much muscle memory to make cool things with vector drawings (unlike, say, pencil-and-paper drawings) which is why they're particularly good for people that can't really draw freehand.
That said, of course there are certain parts of drawing/art that can be taught with words and explanations. But they are advanced topics like perspective or colour theory.
That may be one thing where I can imagine somebody with no graphical experience to (possibly) go wrong with these tutorials: they will probably pick awful colour combinations at first. Also they may not understand when it's a good idea to add a black border around something for good contrast (in cartoony drawings), fortunately the author does (IIRC) point out this trick. But it's the same as for shadows or any other type of drawing "trick", you just gotta wonder "why doesn't my image look quite as good as this other one?" and then look very hard what's the difference. And the nice thing about vectors is that unlike paper drawing, you can actually go back and insert those shadow or outline shapes between the layers of your image, so you can just keep non-destructively playing around until you get the exact result you intend. That's a lot harder with Photoshop or GIMP, not only will you be cruising through the undo-history, when your inspiration can effortlessly draw freehand sketch lines that take you minutes to make look acceptable, it becomes very frustrating (that's why you want to practice that on paper first, and then buy a drawing tablet :) ). With vector-drawing it's more like cutting paper shapes and arranging them (like Southpark :) ), except that in this case, doing it on the computer is actually easier than messing around with scissors and glue.