there are a lot of "do what I mean" type papercuts in openscad. BOSL2 is a library that, for me at least, takes away enough of them to make a rewarding experience. still find myself brute forcing which axis to translate or rotate things the way i want.
concur otherwise that openscad is parameter friendly. the lightbulb moment for me was when i finally grasped its functional grammar and leaned into it, esp recursion instead of algebraic solutions. that should probably be the subject of a tutorial or several.