> Perhaps you did not, but what most people do when confronted by a new
> tool used for a certain task is to look up the relevant documentation on
> the tool, and to give it a thorough reading, before actually using the
> tool.
>
Definitely not my experience and I expect if that was the norm, we would
never have coined RTFM.
This particular experience is quite old at this point, but I had occasion to both support Emacs and also be part of the user support system for MIT students for well over a decade. During that time I helped many hundreds of people use emacs without reading the manual, much less a thorough reading. My loose contacts there suggest that the situation is still pretty much the same.
Hope that helps,
~Chad