> Waiting a year to get from intuition to theorems is a perfect way to ruin math.

It's interesting that you chose to make that point in a thread about calculus specifically. It had pretty shaky foundations for most of its history, and even today, there's a pretty significant disconnect between the mechanics of epsilon-delta and the meaning we assign to the result.

> Math is not supposed to be easy/simple, but it supposed to be a great way to understand systems based thinking.

Math is a means to an end. Making the tool easy to use is a desirable property. I've heard "it's not supposed to be easy" applied to many disciplines, from film photography to software engineering, and I think it's mostly gatekeeping.