I personally found Inform 7’s IDE completely bizarre to understand, honestly! I tried using it twice, once far earlier in my coding journey and once far later, and it made me so confused and tired both times. It took me a day to figure out how to implement a basic room that didn’t bug out.
TADS is not a very easy language to pick up, even in the best of circumstances, for non-programmers, so I agree there! While it’s my preferred parser language and more featured (imo), it’s not at all one I’m trying to say could be as beginner-friendly or accessible as Inform 7. But the thing is, it could always be more beginner-friendly to people interested, if resources are devoted to doing so.
This doesn’t just go for TADS 3, it goes for all other languages and their foibles – Adventuron (which I hear is pretty accessible if you try!), ADRIFT (which is a no-code IDE), Gruescript, Dialog, ZIL which I think only Max is a champion of right now due to lack of resources, etc etc. They may not be as beginner friendly, but they could always be more beginner friendly than they are right now.
That is made more difficult when the default community assumption is that everyone who writes parsers only is, or wants to use, Inform 7. For ex: If someone makes a post in General Design Discussions asking how to do something in a general way, people will inevitably and often exclusively offer Inform 7 code for them to try and come into the conversations only discussing what is possible or limited by Inform 7. This occurs even when seemingly intractable issues are actually just issues with Inform that other languages handle easily.