As a fairly new user (4 months now, 2 apps in production), I found cocoon a little bit hard the first time I used.
When I came to cocoon, I had quite a lot of experience in many of the areas concerned: I used PHP since PHP-FI 2 (lots of years), and have worked for 4 years in an ISP doing Linux/Apache manteinnance for a system used by 1000+ customers. I had 6 months experience in JSP/Servlet development, and 2 years fiddling arround in XML/XSLT.
I came to cocoon 4 months after finishing a project (a digital newspaper) in PHP that made quickly & dirtly more or less what cocoon promised: XSLT processing of XML files generated elsewhere (SQL, external URL, static file) taken the information from an xml configuration file I (curiously enough) dubbed site.map.
I tried to compile and install cocoon and succeded, didn't find it hard, but working my way until i published a web with cocoon took me quite a long time. I think most of the time was lost triying to forget about the traditional approach to web publishing (files or scripts) and get used to the cocoon concept (pipelines). I think a complete newbie to web publishing would have it easier to start (except maybe having some backgound in SAX processing) than any of us. In my first cocoon projects i keep using filenames for the matchers, and had a lot of pipelines. Now i just have 4 or 5 pipelines to serve a complete web site.
The user documentation helps, but its quite technical for non-programmers, which on the other hand is something normal if cocoon is a framework for us programmers to develop web apps, and not an end user solution. Cocoonwiki is the best help out there.
My main concern with cocoon is the time it takes to debug anything.. The system is so complex (different files, different places the pipeline can fail, diferent protocols, generators, etc. ) that finding where the problem is takes too much time doing trial and error.
Maybe a good IDE integration with debugging supported would be a "great leap forward" for the cocoon framework.
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