I've been holding out on learning Houdini because the interface seemed too complicated and so I learnt c4d instead. However I've come to see the absolute power that Houdini's procedural workflow has over c4d and decided to just take a dive and learn it. I'm currently following a course on LinkedIn learning called Houdini Essentials, and while I have been able to understand the interface to a reasonable level, I have absolutely no idea what the hell I'm doing. At some point I just gave up on following the tutorials step by step because it all seems so abstract and complicated. There's menus and submenus everywhere and it gets confusing really quick. I thought I'd catch on quick because Houdini uses nodes and Im used to using nodes in nuke but with Houdini it's something entirely different as you can actually. Go inside a node and it'll have more content inside it. I just wanted to ask if this is how it was with everyone else (and how you overcame it) or if I'm especially just having a hard time and not the kind of person Houdini is meant for.

Don't worry about it. Everyone is overwhelmed at first. Just keep poking at it every day and things will start to make sense, I promise!

Once you start wrapping your head around some common workflows things will snowball from there.
Keep it up!

i feel your pain. when opened it for the first time, (still a beginner, just a few small experimental projects done so far) i especially didn't understand why there were "subnets" in the first place, and i still ask myself now and then if that was really the best decision by the developers. one big "uber"net for everything, why not? wouldn't that be the best?

however, slowly but surely i start to see the benefits (for real). Still scratching my head over things like that there is an "obj/out" and the "stage", and the karma renderer is only in the stage. i mean, what the hell, on what should i focus? yeah, the whole USD might not be something for me (i'm more an allround video producer), at least that's what i read here and there on the internet. Point is, im still a beginner, who am i to say it should be different.

Anyway, the node-based philosophy feels superior to any other 3d package, it was the only interface for me that gave me that feel like, i finally found it . still, there are so many "simple" animations in my head that turns out to be actually pretty complex, but i'm confident that when you can turn your thoughts into images with houdini, the sky is the limit. until then, i enjoy the learning curve

A quick suggestion would be... forget what you think you know, and watch, say, 3 different tutorials on the same topic. After you think you have some idea of having a taste for what is more, i definitely recommend webinars by Jeff (https://www.sidefx.com/profile/old_school/) - "Geometry workflows" has a lot of basic~ish but very applicable and digestible examples.

I've been meaning personally to re-record new videos on introduction to Houdini when H19 drops (with a lot of interaction with Unreal Engine 5 in mind, apart from increasing overall number of topics), but for now I'd suggest clicking on my name and browsing through the list of topics (or here's a link https://www.sidefx.com/tutorials/author/osong/)
I tried to be approachable to the newcomers and reasonably elaborate. Get through those "Getting Started with Houdini" workshop videos, then maybe dive into VOPs.

Happy learning, and don't give up. Persistence is key.

If you use Nuke then you will easily overcome this soon. Just get used to SOPs and understand the concept of attributes. This will give u solid base then you can start learning particles then move on to other dynamics.