First off think of this as if you used another DAW because most people testing out Pro Tools will be coming from another DAW. Most people when starting out are going to gravitate towards the top three or four DAWs the ones with marketing push, Cubase, Pro Tools or Logic etc. They even come from Live, FL Studio etc.
First thing they will do is look at the built in browser, in the case of DP that's a relatively new thing with the Content Browser. They will see a list of locations, presets that do nothing and an empty list of Clippings. There is no indication of an audition selection feature for things like drum loops etc. but you select an audio file in the locations section and it plays, at a volume level determined by a volume slider in the Preferences section nowhere near the Content Browser, and it does not conform to the project tempo.
Right away Which area do they start in? Tracks or Sequence? This is one area of DP that never really gets mentioned by us end users because eventually we futz around enough to realize why Tracks might be useful, but again, if we're only recording 16-24 tracks of audio into DP we might never use Tracks. This like Chunks is an area that's completely different than other DAWs.
So they get to reading figure out Clippings, and set up 25 tracks with complex routing for their small orchestra projects that they can now save as a clipping, and drop into songs where that might be needed. When they do this, nothing plays, after quite some time they figure out that the outputs of the tracks they dragged into the project from clippings are italicized, that they have to select the track with "Audio Out 1-2" and change it to... drumroll, Audio Out 1-2.
Chunks, I think initially most users get confused by Chunks, even jumping from DP2.5 to DP5 with a lot of time off in between had me confused. Chunks were useful in a completely different way when I worked entirely in external MIDI hardware until the bitter end. You could drag Chunks into Chunks with little thought about it if it was all MIDI tracks. When I jumped back to DP around 5 I put myself in a few corners trying to use Chunks in ways that aren't really that productive.
I could go on, the UX of DP is something you learn to navigate it's not at all intuitive. Some of this is due to complexity, but some is just areas of the DAW that didn't get polished before market like no audio file audition volume knob in the browsers, soundbites etc. windows, or DPs seeming inability to know it's own Clippings audio out routings are exactly the same as the current project.
I personally think this stands in the way of DPs market share. The fact that if you were an electronic musician you would be confronted with an arcane setup for auditioning files with no tempo lock, if you were a classical/large MIDI project musician you would be wondering how to fix clippings, and if you were a recording musician you would be navigating Tracks and Sequence wondering what to use?
Some of this is DPs complexity and just learning DP for sure, but some of this is areas of DP that are not really that great, who uses the Content Browser for anything besides Clippings? A massive amount of younger users are used to basic elements of DAWs like the browser being pretty useful, I would say without question Logic, Cubase, Reaper, Live etc. etc. have better browsers.
This is why I think most of us have been using DP for 25+ years, it takes time to navigate the areas of DP that are just flatly UX stupid before you see how uniquely powerful it is. That's not as true of other DAWs, except Reaper, and Reaper is $69 for most people who use it.
