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Piano fingering technique is very important. That's not just which finger hits which key, but also the posture of your finger. That could be what's straining your fingers and giving you trouble reaching keys.

I found a local piano teacher and took weekly lessons. The piano teacher caught these bad habits like finger technique, but also how hard to hit the keys and other things that I wouldn't have noticed on my own.

If you are set on self-learning, getting a few lessons every once in a while will help you stay on track.

> I have tried learning piano and I found a lot of stuff irritatingly hard to get right and got bored

This maps to my first experience. Your first obstacle is the UI and getting your hands to do what your brain wants them to do without thinking about it. For myself learning guitar, this was the hardest obstacle. Once you sort out the mechanics of playing without thinking, you can start thinking about the music and actually having fun.

My only question is, do you really want to learn the piano?

Cause you need to want it, to get through those first few weeks/months of getting used to the UI. Until you break that barrier it's going to be un-fun and sound terrible and be very frustrating. The desire to play needs to be great enough to push through that. If you don't want it, you'll struggle to force yourself to push through.

To answer your actual question, Youtube and other musicians are what I feel most help me grow right now. I've done in person classes, bought books, bought multiple online classes and trawled Youtube for endless hours looking for lessons and song play alongs (getting a sense of the pattern of how important really wanting to learn to play is?). It wasn't until I started playing with other musicians that my abilities and understanding really took off.

I self-tought to about an ABRSM grade 1 level before getting a teacher, but I had done a little bit (less than a year) as a small kid.

Particularly the early stages are very hard and it takes a lot of practice to do seemlingly trivial things. It is a differnet skill from touch typing. I find the "Dozen a Day" books of studies really good for training your fingers to do what you want them to, instead of what they want to do.

The key for me was to forego all theory learning and just have fun with it. Eventually, I got into it enough to go through all the memorization bits.

If piano sounds appealing to you, I recommend using software like Synthesia to make the first few months as easy as possible, to get excited about it.

I have the impression that many people learning instruments, and sadly also many teachers, take an approach that kills motivation. It seems to me that very few people want to become professionals, and that most just want to be able to play a few songs and have fun. For that you don't need perfect posture, or learn all the scales, sight read, etc.

Watch some slow piano music being played by a concert pianist, and you'll see that - except for the odd flourish - they move fingers and wrists as little as possible. The hands float, they don't hover in a tense way.

It also depends on the keyboard you're using. There's a big difference between a soft and fast keyboard action and a piano action with real or simulated hammers. The latter is much harder on your fingers to start with, but gives you more control and stamina later.