I find it a bit dishonest when people describe GPL as confusing.

Sure, anything can be confusing. A door nob is surely confusing to some people, especially if they never seen one before. But a door nob is not inherently confusing, and intellectually honest people would not describe it as such.

Let me ask, what is confusing about a license that say:

  You can and may do anything with this code, so long you allow others to do the same,
  and to any modified version you might create.

There is nothing in the license text beyond that. If all countries legal system was perfectly sane, and that text would be legally full proof, that would be the license text. Since we do not live in utopia, the license text is a bit longer to describe what "can" and "may" mean.

To quote the license:

  To protect your rights, we need to prevent others from denying you these rights or
  asking you to surrender the rights. Therefore, you have certain responsibilities if
  you distribute copies of the software, or if you modify it: responsibilities to
  respect the freedom of others.

Who can say that they are confused by this? tzs, are you really, honestly, confused by that sentence?

The same reason it is hard to learn Emacs, but in the long run learning the tool is worth the startup cost a thousand times.