Yes, eZ publish has a steep learning curve. It is so flexible and powerful that it needs quite a lot of first work. Postnuke et al are easy to setup and use, but they are just simple tools for certain tasks, while you can build with eZ publish different systems to CMS and have all the nice features of it (versioning, translations, ...). Have a look at Zope (http://www.zope.org) and you will appreciate how easy eZ publish is. ;-)
Now, to help you a bit. Read the documentation at http://www.ez.no/developer/ez_publish_3/documentation (starting with eZ publish basics). You also find some help at http://ezwiki.blanko.info/ which is a bit out of date, but easier to read than ez's docs.
You have to start playing around with templates if you want to see the different functionality. And yes, it will be hard and at times frustrating, but it's worth it. Reminds me of the times when I started using Linux (1994) and how frustrating it was sometimes. :-)
The documentation for eZ publish (3.x series) is currently under construction. We're working very hard with this; however - it takes time to write good docs. Please be patient. To understand eZ publish, a good place to start is the "eZ publish basics" chapter (which was published yesterday): http://ez.no/developer/ez_publish_3/documentation/ez_publish_basics
We're also working on a tutorial that explains how to set up an eZ publish site from scratch. This tutorial will be published as soon as it reaches a user-friendly state.
Installation went fine (linux) but now i can do with good tutorial on how to edit styles and looks. I appriciate the effort that goes into quality docs but would it be possible to make a .pdf available with the contents of the docs so far ? so i read/print the whole lot without the full toc. after each helptext etc.
