My understanding is that the founder has some elitist ideas about separating and isolating the supposedly smarter people from everyone else. The opaqueness and complexity is a feature designed to keep out the riff raff.
The earliest Moldbug screeds I came across, nearly ten years ago, were accusations of elitism towards academic computer science, and he's continued espousing that view ever since, interleaved with his other political writings. An early iteration of the Urbit website was one long anti-elitist screed against the functional programming community.
A core axiom of Moldbug's philosophy is that the mathematicalization of computing is an elitist conspiracy. As an example, he thinks that the lambda calculus is intrinsically mathematical, hence elitist, whereas his own concatenative language is non-mathematical, hence non-elitist, by conforming to human nature. It's bizarre to say the least given that his proposed language has an obvious relationship to combinator calculi like SKI calculus, and you'll have to look long and hard to find anyone who thinks the SKI calculus is more intuitive than the lambda calculus.
Interesting take: technical obscurantism as a kind of "captcha."
I'm jumping through the hoops of "Debianizing" something now, and I have to say the Debian project uses similar techniques to limit participation to the committed. The Debian packaging guidelines are very arcane and the docs are kind of scattered and the whole "experience" seems (probably unintentionally) built to keep casual "spam" out of the repo. Not necessarily a bad thing.
Oh, I misunderstood. Urbit just seems hard because it's weird. Having watched people learn the system, there are real advantages. Honestly writing documentation is just hard and we need to do a better job of it. We don't want to keep anyone out.
A core axiom of Moldbug's philosophy is that the mathematicalization of computing is an elitist conspiracy. As an example, he thinks that the lambda calculus is intrinsically mathematical, hence elitist, whereas his own concatenative language is non-mathematical, hence non-elitist, by conforming to human nature. It's bizarre to say the least given that his proposed language has an obvious relationship to combinator calculi like SKI calculus, and you'll have to look long and hard to find anyone who thinks the SKI calculus is more intuitive than the lambda calculus.