i think the problem is it doesn't have easy to find documentation, if any at all, that introduces it as a formal language so everything is just a very hard guessing game of easily forgettable syntax.
You know, a list of reserved words, what their functions are, how the structure works, etc ... the kind you'll see if you pick up some "intro to <language X>" book from no-starch or o'reilly or the kind that GNU Awk/sed/dc have.
I suspect Stephen made a trade off between terseness and power and it being intuitive. Part of the value of jq is that it's effectively a "small program" that can easily be piped in a one liner rather than a program that has clear English keywords as an instruction.
