As engineer of many many years now all I can say with certainty is that confusion, failure, research and eventually small successes have been the central theme of working with computers. I personally love the struggle and mystery but its not for everyone. At the end of the day its about what you want to get out of it. If you want to write programs without learning about the terminal go for it, but I would say there are better gilded cages with GUIs that help you get a lot more done within that constraint.
If you want a deeper understanding, I think its more helpful to admit you can't cheat the process of learning. Slow is the only speed.