Thank you very much for sharing your experience. I agree with some of your points; however, I think that many of the issues mentioned in this thread arise when beginners are not linear readers, and in those cases it is difficult to design a tutorial that works well for everyone.
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In my case, when I compared beginner tutorials for Rust, Go, and Haskell, my honest opinion is that the OCaml tutorials are not worse. In some aspects they are better, and in others they could certainly be improved.
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Note that if you follow the tutorial, it explicitly states (at the beginning) :
Note: opam can manage something called switches. This is key when switching between several OCaml projects. However, in this “getting started” series of tutorials, switches are not needed. If you are interested, you can read an introduction to opam switches here.
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Regarding build systems, this is simply the current trend: Go, Rust, and even Haskell introduce build tools from the very beginning. In my opinion, the tutorial provides an accessible introduction to the basic concepts of dune (some corners should be smoothed, yes). If you prefer the original compiler tools, you can read about them here.
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Bogue is a library, so its portability and platforms support depend on its own developers. From my perspective, this should not be considered an OCaml platform issue… (but I understand your frustration when I beginner selected a library that fails)
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Based on my personal experience on Linux/Mac, it is possible to have a pleasant, fast, and fully featured installation experience when using VS Code. That said, some friction is still possible depending on the user’s environment and setup. In my case, I was even able to install a OCaml environment in a user account on a Linux HPC system straightforwardly, something that was not possible for me with some other languages.