I think it’s likely that there’s a good body of knowledge and experience among the experts, but the problem is how do you get that information out of the experts heads and into the hands of newcomers?
I have read much of Aaron’s book, much of the PDF version of the Inform7 book, parts of Jim’s book (on an as needed basis) and parts of Ron’s document. As good as these are, none of them are a reference and amalgamating all of these, even with extensive editing, would likely not solve the problem.
Not everyone needs reference materials. But the issue is that the learning curve for Inform7 is very easy until you try to do something that’s not syntactically obvious (or for which there is no explicit example) at which point it appears to have such a steep curve as to be nearly impossible. (Or at least impossible without getting help on the forums or through much trial and error.)
Even big projects get done one piece at a time, and I think if it was written as a reference with a discipline and narrow focus, it could be done. Might require multiple authors who have expertise in different areas. But don’t try to recreate a mega-tutorial + reference + examples that encompasses everything that’s already out there. The trick is to make it definitive on some of these inner workings or programmery things so that there’s a final word on how stuff really works.
Inform is a much more sophisticated and broad language than C, but if you keep the focus narrow, it’s probably a couple hundred of pages. Or perhaps a different way to look at it is, if there were a series of articles or chapters that documented one piece at a time, each section would have a lot of value to those who want go beyond the learn by example approach.
Again, this is not a nock on the existing materials, just a suggestion or perhaps an opportunity for someone who wants to write a book or run a kickstarter project.
Both have their place! With Python specifically I never look at those official tutorials, the docs usually have numerous examples. If I did look at something else it would be Dive Into Python.
Jeff Nyman’s Locale Tutorial to my mind comes closest to the kind of manual that would really be a boon, both to beginners and adepts. It has perhaps a bit too much of the “tutorial” kind of thing in it (“type this text, press go, you’ll see this output”), but it actually tackles the I7 library as a library, explaining the order of execution of rules, exactly what details the library takes into account, and to some degree how to tweak this. A manual that did this for the entire system, and didn’t shy away from also talking about the I6 underbelly where appropriate, would be on the right track. It would also be a mammoth undertaking.