I think there is a difference in kind between "do these steps manually to understand them" and "hunt down these versions of packages on various websites around

I think there is a difference in kind between "do these steps manually to understand them" and "hunt down these versions of packages on various websites around the net". It's true that you might learn something from doing the latter, but it's different from what you'd learn doing the former. Edit: a generic point that I'd make is that just because something is hard, and there's a reason it's hard, doesn't mean that it has to be hard in every possible way. This is another version of the distinction between accidental and intrinsic complexity.