Bingo. I usually find the people that complain the loudest about JS have been burned by their own ignorance. I'll admit the learning curve for basic JS syntax

Bingo. I usually find the people that complain the loudest about JS have been burned by their own ignorance. I'll admit the learning curve for basic JS syntax can be a little high, but reading through and understanding most of Crockford's book will get you 80-90% of the way there. The rest is either ES2015 or framework-specific -- both of which build off of basic JS. A good software developer learns constantly.