If a tree falls in the forest, but that tree is not mentioned in the documentation – indeed, if the documentation says something like "there's this forest, we used to live there, it's dirty and primitive and stuff, now all the cool kids live in Manhattan"...
The point is, the beginners never find the tree. They get lost, kind of like I've gotten lost in this metaphor, and they go try something else.
I would agree (if I understand the metaphor within a metaphor, that is) that documentation and best practices are probably the biggest weakness in the Chef community. Once you add in tools like berkshelf or librarian-chef where the tool creators recommend totally different workflows from those recommended by Opscode, not to mention the wide variety of testing stories... it's a mess. I've heard from someone at Opscode that fixing that mess is one of their priorities, but until then, it's definitely a problem.
Where we really need to be is a place where configuration management is just another part of application repositories (there's a parallel here to db migrations), so that web applications are completely self-contained. That includes versioning, unit testing, etc. I haven't yet seen any of the configuration management tools come forward with a solid unified best practice solution for treating applications this way, but there are a lot of people working in that direction, which makes me very hopeful for the near future.
The point is, the beginners never find the tree. They get lost, kind of like I've gotten lost in this metaphor, and they go try something else.