I definitely agree. Trying to jump into F# without any knowledge of .NET just requires so much mind-juggling. As a beginner, so much of the difficulty and frustration comes from the fact that you are missing so much foundation knowledge that you don't know what to ask or look for, and may not even recognize the answer. Interop won't look or behave or be optimized how you expect and will just wreak havoc with your attempts to build a mental model of what you're learning because of the strange inconsistency.
Sometimes the answer is just so obvious to people who have that foundation knowledge that no one else has bothered to ask on reddit/stackoverflow and you are googling into the wind. Sometimes the only thing you can find is several years old and giving advice that's no longer correct. I'm not sure which is worse.
I had the same trouble trying to build a learning project in Clojure. I remember when starting, I had only used pip and apt-get (and not knowing them well), I didn't even recognize Leiningen as a package manager. It worked so differently from what I thought I needed (and billed itself as a "project automation and configuration tool") that I didn't even recognize it was the solution to my problem.
It's just so easy to take for granted how many things are obvious to us that make solving problems in our comfort zone easy for us and paralyzing for another person, and I think this bias finds its way into the documentation and mindset of entire communities. This makes it harder and harder for something to be approachable if you don't fit in that same box. I'd love to love F#, (I read F# for fun and profit and worked through the F# Koans, but haven't made anything), but I'm not sure if I'll ever get over the hump unless I find myself working somewhere that's already using it. My feelings on Python are somewhere between ambivalent and bitter by now, but the work gets done, I know what to expect, and I never feel lost.
What would really help me, I think:
- More "idiomatic" wrapper libraries around .NET libraries, even if they're slower or have less features/customization.
- Pure F# libraries of typical utilities or ports of popular libraries in other languages, even if they are slower or have less features/customization.
- Content about F# project management from the perspective of someone who uses Python. This is how you do it in Python, this is how you do it in F#, this is why, these are the pros, these are the cons, these are just different because that's the way it is.