Learning FP is *definitely* miserable. It's filled with a ton of specialized terminology that you don't normally encounter in day to day development work. As you point out, the materials themselves are generally poor. And imperative thinking is very much in line with how people naturally think, while functional is very non-intuitive.

As someone who had a lot of similar experience and background to you (my first development experience was typing in scads of BASIC on a Wang terminal when I was 5... I learned to code in high school on an NCR mainframe using BASIC in vi with line numbers and GOTO, my second language was COBOL, etc.), I learned a bit of FP along the way, and of course, modern languages have gotten a ton of FP features. But as much as FP intrigues me, and as much as I think it's well-suited for a lot of things, I really think the typical day to day business developer really just needs a smart imperative system with just enough OO and FP to solve some specialized scenarios.

J.Ja