@acorncom I found the Epic - improving Ember Data sections from @jenweber but the change list looks to be more focused on terminologies and other changes than the guide structure.
Lately, a few people have commented me that the learning and starting experience was hard mostly because of Ember Data.
I think a change in the guide structure (as commented above) could be a great improvement and have an impact on helping to demystify the “is hard to learn”.
The current guide describes in the introduction:
Some developers write all their own code to handle API requests, using native JavaScript methods like fetch or third-party libraries.
This is the sentence that talks about other alternatives. I think it does not highlight enough the other alternatives because some people are likely interpreting the Model guides as “the way to go” and it is making their onboarding process harder.
My reason for jumping on this issue is to share how some folks interpreted the JSON-API/Ember relationship. They decided to provide a JSON-API backend or endpoints because Ember Data uses it as default format, and this added more work for them.
The following quote may be related:
Without discussing the benefit of the JSON-API format, I think REST is still much more widely adopted and in some projects adopting the JSON-API may be adding unnecessary complexity.
Because of all mentioned above, I also suggest either emphasize more the usage of the REST adapter or underemphasizing the JSON-API usage on the ED guides.