I’m trying to learn to do animation in Blender. It’s teaching me that software can be like bureaucracy and red tape. It’s only with endless frustrations that you can navigate this interface.
Take for example:
To edit an NLA strip. Select the strip then hit tab. That is all the manual says. “Good luck figuring out what to do next.” This should be written on almost every page of that damn useless Blender manual.
The strip is now green and there are green keyframes above it. This is completely useless. It would be like pressing tab when you edit materials, the mesh goes green indicating that you have to change to a mesh editing panel to edit the mesh. If that was the case you would throw Blender in the trash if it did that.
I noticed while watching someone edit an animation on YouTube that to edit an NLA track you must leave the NLA track panel. Makes perfect sense.
Blender wanted to do an overhaul for animation but the gave up as no one was interested.
To be fair, a lot of Blender development before 2.8 (especially in the early days) was about doing things “The Blender Way”. A lot of early development was about padding the feature page and about adding hacks and quickly done features for the Open Movie Projects, as a result these features would seldom get any polish unless a volunteer decided to work on it. Much of the FOSS world back then would actually frown on professionals who dared talk about usability ideas from commercial apps (because few people, not even devs, actually knew much about the industry they wanted to compete in). Essentially, FOSS was defined by bubble mentality.
This is why various things related to animation and other areas are still kind of a mess (even though the situation has been improving since 2.8 was released and even though the infamous ‘Blender bubble’ has been deflating). Animation in general was supposed to get a big boost with the Animation 2020 project, but it had to be delayed due to other issues needing to be addressed.
There are also pages dedicated to keyframes. They are the first ones of chapter about Animation.
In old UI, animation layout was showing NLA Editor and action editor.
In 2.5x releases, keyframes were editable in NLA Editor.
But Dopesheet or Graph Editor are a lot more effective to manipulate keyframes.
Keyframes are still shown as a reference in NLA Editor.
Because an action can last longer than an action strip referring to it.
Original action can correspond to different frames than the ones where strip has been moved to.
That is useful when you are editing action or action clip.
Nowadays, NLA editor is absent of animation workspace.
You are supposed to start using dopesheet and touch NLA Editor, when you have an intermediate level.
But tutorials about animation are rare.
Before EEVEE and Cycles X, it was a time-consuming task to render animations. People able to do some where rare.
And during Blender refactoring, UI was constantly changing.
So, things are not obvious. Simply, because ability to make them obvious is really recent.
Thing is, that is not a manual, it’s a explanation of the approach. I don’t want dedications and explanation without the manual showing the pathway to be able to do it in practice. In fact the manual should be dedicated to teaching new users. New users mostly don’t know where everything is, they already know the concepts. Most of the questions in Stack Exchange, that should already be in the manual, it’s WHERE? Where do I find this, where is the setting for that. Blender has improved since 2.8 but the biggest unchopped jungle is animation.
Certainly, there might be room for some “that was then, this is now” tutorials on various subjects. I’ve been using Blender since the days when to do anything it was Shift+Control+Alt+scratch-your-nose." A lot has changed over these many years about what is the “correct” way to do things, and with the 3.x releases those changes seem to be happening faster and faster. In many ways, the documentation isn’t keeping up. The people who write the docs understand the subject implicitly as it is now, but they only describe what each button, switch or dial does – not the proper way to use them. The proper way to use them today.
There are around an hundred of keys on a keyboard. Several are kept as modifiers or direct access to OS shortcuts.
So, you are left with around 90 keys to manage a software that does several hundreds of operations.
In very old versions, keymap was trying to give a shortcut to all operators.
And progressively, at each new release, developers were assigning a new shortcut to new operator created.
That ended up with a keymap too monstrously big, too vast to be retained and with a lot of combinations.
In 2.5x keymap became fully customizable.
In 2.8x, keymap was refactored, simplified and limited to only a part of tools. Active tools were created to allow to change tool triggered by a left click. Menus were completed and cleaned-up.
In 3x, search was improved.
There is only one guy periodically paid to manage documentation written by volunteers and developers.
Most recent part of documentation is written, at the moment, developers are introducing new features in release notes of a new release.
A part of it was automatically generated from tooltips.
A part of it has tutorials done by volunteers.
Blender is a big software. That takes years to rewrite the whole manual. But there is a new release, every trimester.
Blenders manual could be a lot better but as mentioned there is not enough manpower. Improvment requests can be sent in the manual directly at the bottom of each page and I said I’d do so but much to my embarrassment I have so far submitted not a single update request.
On the bright side there are gazillions of online resources - from youtube to text tutorials and online forums - where you can find most stuff. Simply searching for the NLA editor on YT leads you to a bunch of pretty decent explanations on how that thing works. It is a great feature once you have wraped your head around it.
The most impressive manual I ever read was VIC 20 manual.
A long time ago I didn’t know anything about computer language, I barely knew algebra or algorithms or its differences. Here is how you do this, just do this. I did it, then I messed around with the numbers and experimented then you got an explanation of what each line did.
Making it stupid simple.
To me a manual must do 2 things,
a) educate
b) encourage curiosity
That is all the manual says. 
“Good luck figuring out what to do next.” This should be written on almost every page of that damn useless Blender manual.
It would be like pressing tab when you edit materials, the mesh goes green indicating that you have to change to a mesh editing panel to edit the mesh. If that was the case you would throw Blender in the trash if it did that. 
