First time user working through the basics tutorial. Questions & issues.

I'm a first time user and finding the package less intuitive than I'd hoped, I'm working my way through the basics tutorial.
1) When I first tried to drag & drop rectangles, I could only draw rectangle outlines which vanished immediately upon completion. After several tries, the rectangle tool suddenly began behaving as the tutorial said it should. What was happening at first?
2) The tutorial talks about the dropper tool. I can't see anything that to my mind matches that description.
      a) The tutorial should give an illustration of each tool as it is introduced.
      b) I clicked on help, which in most software would provide an option to enter "dropper tool", from where I would expect to find an illustration and instructions on use. I could see no search function.
      c) I opened the online manual. Again there was no search.
     d) The first few times I clicked on Index, I did not get an index. There was not much on the screen, though it included a link to the Contents. After a few tries, I found myself on the index.
     e) From the index, clicking on "Dropper tool" gave me a page about styles. The internal links need fixing.
     f) By using my browser's "find on page" facility, I was able to go through occurrences of "dropper" until I found an illustration of the tool, which was exactly as I'd expect from the name. I returned to Inkscape to confirm that no such tool was displayed. It was only at that stage that I noticed the faint and tiny double chevron at the bottom of the toolbar and, having nothing to lose, clicked on it and was at last presented with the list "Dropper" and "Connector" and needless to say, clicking on "Dropper" gave me the tool to use. I had seen no mention of the double chevron in the tutorial so far.

I suspect that the programme will be very good once I'm familiar with it, but you seem to do everything in your power to stop me attaining that familiarisation. I recognise that when you're developing a system, the documentation is the extremely boring bit of drudgery that you just have to work to so that the plebs can use it, but this side of it needs tightening up an improving. When you know the package inside out, it is natural to make assumptions when writing documentation and help scripts and it is only when you try it out on the lowest common denominator, the user, that you find out what those assumptions were. User feedback is part of the loop that enables completion of beta testing and also informs improvement and refinement. I hope my little contribution will help towards that.

Thanks for what I'm confident that I'll come to think of as a great product!