I suspect that people who don't "get" pointers (#4 in the article) actually have a much harder time with the pointer declaration and manipulation syntax in C than actually understanding how pointers work and what they let you do. For instance, in C the * character is used both to declare a pointer and to dereference one and they can be stacked to dereference nested structures. Then & references a variable memory loca…
This problem can be solved by thinking of * as always dereferencing a pointer. So:
int *a; /* "*a" is an int, thus a is a pointer to one */
int *b, *c; /* *b and *c are both ints */
> Then & references a variable memory location but is also used in method signatures to change the semantics of calling a function into pass-by-reference. To complicate & further, & is often seen alongside const declarations, which are a whole other thing that people have to keep in their heads.
Now it sounds like you're talking about C++ moreso than C. In C, & is pretty much always the "address-of" operator (except in contexts where it's clearly logical- or bitwise-AND).
From your post, it seems that the problem is more one of poor teaching, poor explanations (metaphors), or poorly-designed extensions (C++) as opposed to shortcomings of C.