I'm brand new to Illustrator, first of all. I've been using GIMP for maybe 7 years, and Inkscape for about a year now. I wanted to give Illustrator a try because I like how clean everything looks, however after giving it a very forgiving chance, it seems extremely unfriendly to new users. I tried out the Learn section to try and get a good feel for the UI, but even the Learn section seems to not know how it works. It feels like it was created for a different program altogether. It keeps mentioning choosing options from the 'Properties' tab, and then shows an image that doesn't even look like the tab that I'm looking for, and after I figured it out I was so confused about how anyone could think that the tutorial was a good idea. Right now I'm on the tutorial that teaches you how to use gradients, but the entire Gradient UI is utter garbage and doesn't show labels for anything. Like, I tried to just make a gradient but it assumed that I only want to work in grayscale so I had to figure out how to actually use colors, and then I figured that out, I had to figure out how to actually choose colors other than using that TINY color bar.

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Overall the UI seems like it tries way too hard to be simple to the point that finding anything is next to impossible. I've been looking for the past 10 minutes for the button that makes my text all caps and how to change the "Leading" because the gif they provide is useless and I can't clearly find it anywhere.

Are there any actually helpful tutorials anywhere?