[robenkleene]

Any examples of software that accomplishs this well?

A quick summary of my experience:

- Most complex apps are not learnable linearly: Ableton Live, Final Cut Pro, Logic Pro X, Photoshop, After Effects, Blender, all practically require reading the manual.

- A few apps are ok at it: Adobe Lightroom, and Sketch, although those apps also are probably less powerful than those in the first category, e.g., Photoshop can do the majority of what both of those apps can do, and more.

I would actually put shells and text editors as some of the easiest complex apps to learn linearly, because you can do so much with them with just cut and pasting text from the internet. Try following along with a Blender tutorial video that's not for an absolute beginner, and you'll get stuck almost immediately, because you won't know the keyboard shortcuts to perform the actions in the video. This happens far less with programming tutorials involving text editors and terminals.