it’s the sort of thing i wont really understand until i experience it but the amount of work it takes to get there is rough 

 I found German easier than French because the pronunciation is much more like English. I also found German grammar logical, regular but maybe more complex and perhaps this is what people dislike.

Most young Germans speak English well and I've heard techie ones jokingly call English "compressed" German since the words are so long. 

 Not necessarily hard, but the fact German has masculine/feminine/neuter articles for nouns seemed like a lot of extra work. 

 oh im just not gonna learn those for a bit 😂 

 Might be easier to try for it at the beginning. It affects the declension of the noun and I think some other stuff, from what I remember of my high school German class. 

 Don't forget about the nomintiv, accusativ, and dativ ridiculous rules. I was taught to never ask why they have them cause there's no good reason.  

 I have an opinion on this. I studied german for some months in Brazil and in Berlin and it's not a particularly difficult language. People find it hard because:

1. It's portrayed as hard, with hard sounds, and it's famous for being terrifying;
2. It's the only main western language that has declension. I actually understood what are these cases after I studied Czech, which had 7 cases for everything, while German have 4 only for articles. Depending on the teacher you had, it's very hard to understand what is the difference between the dative and accusEative cases; and
3. Germans are tough nitpickers. While, for most languages, natives don't speak correctly the formal grammar and are just happy that someone else is trying to learn their language and usually encourage them saying "wow, your <language> is perfect! I can't believe you are a foreigner", Germans seem to speak correctly with the formal rules and will try to correct every minor mistake you make even minor pronunciation differences. 

So although Czech is extremely more difficult than German, I found more difficult to study and practice German.  

 It was the when/how to use Der, Die, and Das that jacked me up in HS. Now there was also weed in HS so its probably easy in reality - you'll be winning Deutsch rap battles in no time! 

 In many parts of Europe german was ubiquitous even outside of german-speaking countries for a long time. Thus in schools only grammar was taught to people who mostly knew spoken-word german all their lives. Then all of a sudden a generation of students showed up never having heard a word of it spoken before and it threw the whole system off and a whole generation came out of that basically traumatized by unrealistic expectations of the school programs.