We’ve been working on making Discourse easier to learn and use. If you can provide specific examples of areas in the interface that people find confusing or improvements you think would help, let us know! This is a broader question than just this topic of course, but it is especially important that people who come use discourse for a short term event like a conference have a good experience. It should at least be easy to use and reasonably closely match their experience with other similar platforms.
Yeah, it can be hard to please and effectively support both power users and people who are not interested in becoming power users, and we have to find a balance. Right now a focus is on improving staff-experience so non-technical people who are interested in e.g. spinning up a discourse site for a small, private community find it easy to do.