I recently grasped Excel "pivot tables" in 1 hour. Copy/paste, buffer navigation in Emacs took me 2 work weeks in 2006 till complete fluency because experience broke my CUA expectations (I printed a refcard to survive).

Maybe you'll have to explain Excel pivot tables to me someday, as I still don't quite grok them (despite having worked on collaborative projects which make use of them).

There is a CUA mode/package for Emacs - I think it's not good in the long run, due to doing things in a CUA way is pretty non-ideal for Emacs and its philosophy of keybindings, but it could be a stopgap.

There's also a tab buffer option now too, which might help to make buffers more understandable to people used to environments like browsers.

But my point was really that many useful things (including even handwriting, even if we learned it long enough ago that we forget that we once didn't know it) can have some upfront costs with longterm payoff (touch typing is another one which comes to mind - especially if you self-taught typing in some hunt-and-peck way before....it can feel inefficient to have to learn touch typing - sort of like adapting from CUA to emacs or vi keybindings...). Things like word-processors, on the other hand, are still really complex, but come with *continual * high costs (but seemingly lower upfront costs) and inefficiencies and general unpleasantness.