Yes, I’m afraid C++ is just fundamentally much harder than Java!
Java makes it very easy to deal with libraries because of its excellent package-based design, but in C++ you’ve just got a big heap of code, and it’s up to the user to figure out how to structure it. One of my main reasons for creating Juce in the first place was that when you’re trying to write a complex C++ app, you generally need to collect together and link a whole bunch of random, incompatible 3rd party libraries, and I figured that I’d try to find a way to contain all that nightmarish mess in one self-contained lump, away from the application. If you think Juce is hard to get started with, just try writing a cross-platform app without it!
I’ve done my best to make it all run ‘out-of-the-box’, but it’s an ongoing project, and hopefully with the new Jucer it’ll all suddenly become much easier.
It’s quite helpful if beginners let me know about any errors they hit when they first try to run, because there could be simple things I could change or explain better to avoid them. Having got my own machine into a state where everything works perfectly, it’s hard to know exactly what setup is needed on a fresh install.