Thanks for your reply. You may also appreciate my reply to @surfermarly below.

I probably should not have said a criticism isn't "valid" but instead could have said it may be valid but not helpful and, from that perspective, not valid right now as far as prioritizing what Steemit, inc should be doing.

It's easy for us to focus on Steemit and the problems there (retention, UI/UX, onboarding, marketing, etc), but it's much harder to get a good perspective on the issues of the underlying blockchain which they are focusing on to bring us to millions and millions of users. If that's not ready yet, fixing the front-end issues will only make things worse if done right now.

Here's an analogy:

Let's say we're building a bus. The passengers get on and are like, "What the hell? There are only egg-crates for seats? They need to fix this right now and put in more comfortable, padded seats so people don't get off the bus right away. So few people are using this thing right now because of that."

That would be a "valid" criticism for sure. But... with a little bit of perspective, it may not be very informative or helpful or even valid in terms of setting current priorities. To stay with our analogy, what if the bus actually had a small car engine in it just to test things out. It can only pull about 5 people. From that perspective, adding amazing seats for another 100 people doesn't make much sense before upgrading the engine, right? In fact, if they did fix the seats first, and those 100 people jump on board, the bus might stop working completely.

That's obviously an extreme example, but the point being the underlying blockchain engine is the most important thing Steemit, inc is working on right now. That's what will lay the framework for many years from now. That's what has to be rock solid. Once that's done, as we improve the front-end, we'll have the capacity to handle it.

Again, thank you for your comment and for disagreeing with me respectfully. I really do appreciate that.

Edit: I forgot to answer your question. Learning code in general is easy. You can start with building games in Scratch as an example. Learning blockchain C++ may not be as easy. That's pretty advanced stuff and though I've programmed in a half a dozen languages myself since 1996, I don't have much experience with C++ which is something I plan to fix in the future as I continue to dig into this codebase. I plan to start with some C++ tutorials online.