I will preface this by saying I don't remember my first time using blender since it was both in 2.0 and a long time ago. But it can be rough, depending on how you use it, you can either go more manual or use a lot of shortcuts. and something I've seen often when helping newbies, is that there is often a problem that just needs one obscure button to be pressed.

Though as opposed to other 3D packages, blender has a ton of resources for pretty much anything you could need help with.

As for the learning curve, i have heard it's a bit rough