We all started from scratch Dennis
Many people attracted from the free option of Davinci, dived from zero and became full users.
There are some many AE guides and how to's that one can develop a simple workflow and enhance it in the future. If the user is not interesting in multicam edit or long clips event assembly etc etc perhaps it is better to go with AE.

As a side note if i could start over i would prefer over everything a node based nle like Nuke.