You read that right for the most part except you missed important nuance.

You have to understand the tasks themselves are not and cannot ever be simple because of the adversarial nature imposed by bad actors.

You can point at a small component piece and say that's a simple task, but taken in the full real working context its not at all simple because there were other requirements that were ignored when viewed in isolation that are crucial to continued function in a useful way.

The frustration is due to a skill issue, anyone that could set a system up without issue would, and there would be no frustration if that were the case.

Importantly also, this isn't a software problem, its a problem that cannot ever be completely solved by software. There are problems that computation simply cannot solve directly. This is one of them. Its touched on in Automata theory under the Limits of Computation.

Anytime you have two different underlying states whose structure is identical when examined (a single state that cannot be differentiated) it falls into one of these type of problems. Reputation systems are a form of approximation for hidden state systems used to differentiate in such cases by skewing it so those that those who abuse the system are limited and quarantined, whereas those that don't can use the system. The hidden states are required to make these systems work and retain usefulness.

The alternative is no communication at all because resources a limited, and the SNR doesn't allow differentiation putting that cost on every reader who will stop using such systems because it makes them useless and the cost is unreasonable.

The requirements and cost that result from implementation of the whitepapers requirements keep the systems useful. Not everyone should be running their own server largely because they aren't appropriately qualified to fulfill their responsibilities and obligations in doing so, and as a result of that lack of expertise cause issues for other businesses imposing cost when they are allowed to do so.

The alternative, having no requirements is having no messaging at all. You literally can't have it both ways.

The complexity involved is why Messaging and Email Systems are their own subspecialty within IT.

> Building all of it from scratch by yourself simply isn't realistic

You don't build it all from scratch. You configure the software someone else built from scratch appropriately to meet the implicit requirements to interoperate or you don't, and the consequence of failure is mail doesn't get accepted for those recipients at that provider.

As I said, non-professionals writing tutorials making it seem like this is simple, and people blaming their own ignorance on others; is where all the hardship is coming from.

It isn't simple at all, if it were an average child could do it.

I can tell you from experience, nearly every single postfix stack that I've walked onto the job and seen at a small business, lacked critical functionality in their configuration with only a single exception in a decade. That's thousands of instances that required standing up new infrastructure correctly, and they didn't have issues after that.

In nearly all of those cases a non-professional got hired, lied about their experience, and then set them up for failure and they got what they paid for, but didn't know it at the time.

It could have been set up correctly if the people were qualified, but they weren't and it wasn't, and its an ongoing cost because requirements change over time, when they change you change, or your system stops working.

Things like auditing and logging, rate limiting, alerting, migration, features like list-unsubscribe, and many other requirements... etc.

Most cases, people stop the configuration at the point where an email technically goes out and they call it a day, up until calamity strikes because they didn't pay attention to important things.

There are people who pay for the advice and are told months in advance if you keep doing this you'll wake up one day unexpectedly and find no email can go out, and they don't stop. They have to learn it the hard way.

Imposter syndrome is a thing in the industry, but there are also a lot of imposters pretending to be professionals as well.