Many of us started out gardening and just used that same knowledge and applied it to cannabis. I never gave growing cannabis any real thought and just treated it like another plant. I didn't realize I needed to follow some cannabis specific mumbo jumbo or watch youtube until I read it online. I chose to ignore that and continue to just treat it like any other plant which is all that's really necessary for such an easy to grow plant.
New here, but I've been growing other stuff for decades. Do my own cold stratification, propagation, seed saving, etc.
I knew going in there would be 'more to it' than most plants, and there is. We're asking a plant that does 'its own thing' in the wild to really act differently to produce its flowers in quantity and with certain properties. It's also been crossed and genetically manipulated the fuck out of normalcy. So the real challenge has been learning what those new requirements are and how to best do them.
Interesting to me that people have trouble with the easy part (seed germination) and make that multistep and complex...but the real hard part is in the indoor environmental conditions and nutrient needs, training etc. I have to think that if there were a 3 or 5 month long germination process before you even get them in the ground it would be a much thinner herd of growers.
Hats off to the guys who have bootstrapped their way into some really amazing looking plants. And awesome that there's now accessible good science for those who like to learn that way.