What are the biggest reasons newcomers give up on OCaml?

I promise I’ll have better opinions soon. I’m well past the beginner phase of Dune now but things I take for granted with other tools are glaringly absent at the overview level. Maybe I’ll find out how those things work once I start writing my own custom rules for various code generators, but Dune’s opinion that basic string manipulation is for advanced users seems off-putting to me. Accordingly, I think (but I’m not sure) that I’ll have to reorganize all my expect tests to work with Dune’s opinion about how to organize those, then rewrite my OMake library to accommodate it during my transition. That’s my expectation at least. Will see eventually.