edit:
@pwned answered while I was writing this and I am happy that he condensed most of what I tried to say and I fully agree.
Hi @Naftali,
I like to spend some time here since I feel like you are opening a discussion which is much more general then "just using OpenWrt" (which is admittedly a huge topic on its own).
Since you are mentioning you DBA background. What I have noticed over time in IT you can split people in terms of there skills and interests in IT related concepts as follows:
Physical
- Network
- Hardware
Virtual:
- Software
- Databases
If you read this from top to bottom you get kind of "strictly defined by RFCs and ideally implementation independent" to "High abstraction with different implementations for more or less the same thing" (just think about SQL here). That is no definitive classification but some feeling. You probably are much more in the later mentioned area opposed to OpenWrt which more relates to the first 2 levels. This is no Issue by itself but probably makes you unfamiliar with the whole environment.
If you say this then sure you lag some experience which is quite normal for someone getting into a new area. I suspect that is as well related to the difference of abstractions between small embedded systems and fully fledged software products. In fact no matter if someone regards the wiki as hard to understand or not... It needs to be close to the respective OpenWrt Implementation and the issue the author tries to solve which might not be the same as yours. A good example of that is an Issue of mine which is quite simple and had quite a simple answer as well but if you have a look at the time range of the posts you see that it took me quite some effort to get it right...
I myself was kind of just starting out in that particular area and hat no clue of what I am doing.
This is something I noticed myself looking into some of the questions other people asked. Since they don't know the environment they are working in yet they are not able to immediately ask precise questions. Which of cause makes the answers feel unrelated. I had tried to answer such a question a few days ago and as you can see there are quite some things wrong at the beginning and you need to learn a lot which is fine by me. I try to suggest some commands you can use to debug your issue. Because this is what it comes down to a lot. Debugging and taking the time to spend some effort... to learn...
And please realise. Even if it looks just absurd what is happening. You ALWAYS can figure it out !
If you do this you are probably fine with using the console. Which is really good and should help a lot. But that is just not all you need. Are you using the ip command and tcpdump on a regular bases and think about why everything works as it does? In fact this is not about using the console or even about using Linux. It is about configuring and networking which might be completely different from what you are used to.
Conclusion:
If you think about all that it is neither about people being stupid nor about developers are to complicated. It is more like "this is how things are" and it works for people who are digging into it.
I admit that some tutorials could be a bit more modern or maybe discuss the respective topic a bit more broadly. But as far as I know we lack some central authority (and in open source we probably should lag that) to oversee the creation of arbitrary documentation post which might be redundant and therefore confusing. I happily leave this to the more experienced users but sure help them out If I can.
@Naftali,what ever you get out of this. Please try to continue asking questions in the forum and try to read about the topics you don't get immediately. If so we will figure things out.
I am only using OpenWrt for about two years myself and this is what I have noticed so far. So please correct me If I am wrong at any point.