This is a brain dump of my experience trying to get something going with Ember.js. My goal was to get to know the ins and outs of the framework by completing a pretty well defined task that I had lots of domain knowledge about. In this case reproducing a simple Yammer feed. As of this time, I have not been able to complete that task. So this is a subjective rundown of the things I think make it difficult to get a handle on Ember. NOTE: My comments are addressing the Ember team and giving suggestions on what they could do to improve the situation.
The new guides have pretty good explanation of the various parts of the framework; routers, models, templates, views. But it's not clear how they all get strapped together to make something that works. There are snippets of examples all over the place like:
App.Router.map(function() {
match('/home').to('home');
});