Earlier quoted context omitted.
One tip I read somewhere (possibly from Steve Yegge?) was that it's a good idea to disable the Emacs menu bar - and I agree. The Emacs menu bar is this kind of weird uncanny valley thing. It looks like a normal menu bar, but any time you click one of the items on it, you'll find that you're doing something that actually only makes sense if you're into Emacs already. It won't help you when you're starting out, and onc…
The Edit menu has undo, cut, copy, and paste. Is that stuff that only makes sense if you're into Emacs already? The Help menu has the tutorial and the manual. Same question. The File menu has open file, save, save as, close, and quit. If you open a file which uses a mode which has options you get a menu showing those options. I don't think the discoverability of all those things is worth giving up in exchange for 1 m…
Almost none of the options bring up a friendly GUI dialog of the sort you might be accustomed to; you're most likely just plonked back in the Emacs frame, possibly in some new window that opened in some random place, that doesn't seem to work quite like anything you've ever seen before, or possibly in the minibuffer, ditto, plus its own set of additional confusing aspects.
So perhaps the suggestion to just dispense with it entirely (along with the toolbar, which I forgot to mention...) was just the thing that got me over this initial notch in the difficulty curve, the bit where I just needed to give up and accept that Emacs was going to be one of those things that was absolutely not like anything else.
(You're not wrong about the discoverability though. I've been using Emacs for 20 years now and I did find a couple of interesting-looking things.)